Terror Squad Read online

  Chiun looked up, puzzled.

  “You have a Washington Monument, correct?”

  “Yeah,” said Remo.

  “And a Lincoln Memorial?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have a Columbus Circle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then let us visit the Streisand monument, for surely if Americans could honor a lecher, a failure and a navigator who got lost, they must mark the birthplace of one of their most beautiful souls.”

  “Chiun. Barbra Streisand is not a national hero.”

  “And that is the sort of country you think worth saving?” asked Chiun. He had been silent since Youngstown, Ohio, when As the Planet Revolves came on. Remo could have sworn that the plot never changed, not even the point in the plot that he had overheard the year before in Miami when Dr. Ramsey Duncan feared telling Rebecca Wentworth that her stepfather, William Vogelman, the discoverer of a cure for malnutrition among the Auca Indians, was not her stepfather at all but the lover of her half-sister who had threatened suicide. Zipping out of Youngstown one year later, Remo heard the television set in the back seat disclose that Dr. Duncan was still pondering whether to tell Rebecca about her stepfather.

  But now, in New York State, the soap operas were ended and Chiun was sitting silently in the back seat, his eyes closed.

  Dr. Smith had wanted Remo to fly to Patton College, but Remo feared being seen at any airport. The news was full of the mystery-man imposter who had boarded the plane and perhaps even pushed the terrorists to their deaths, and while the cameras only got the back of Remo’s head, and the artist’s sketches were no closer to his looks than the cover of a paperback book, all airports were very much aware of a six-foot man with dark eyes and thick wrists.

  Smith had continued his strange excitability concerning this terrorist thing—Dr. Harold W. Smith, who had been chosen a decade or more before to head CURE because of his integrity and stability.

  Smith had flown out to Los Angeles to brief Remo personally again, knowing full well that each meeting was a risk to CURE’s almost sacred cover.

  “We can get you to Patton College tonight. Navy Phantom. Less than three hours from coast to coast,” Smith had said.

  “With the whole country associating air and the mystery man? Suppose someone gets word of a guy looking like me getting taken for a ride in a Navy jet? C’mon, Smitty. What’s the matter with you?”

  “You don’t know how urgent this is, Remo.”

  “All the more reason to be careful and proper and competent”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Chiun now,” Smith said.

  “I’m beginning to sound like you used to sound.”

  “You’ve got to smash them now, Remo. Now.”

  “I’ll get them, and I’ll get them right. Now relax.”

  “The International Conference on Terrorism is scheduled for New York next week. We can’t allow this force to be in existence by then. Do you understand? Do you really understand what’s involved?”

  “Yes,” said Remo. “We’re up against it.”

  “Right,” said Smith, and suddenly his lemon face flushed maroon.

  “Are you all right?” Remo asked softly.

  “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Fine. Perfectly all right”

  “Can I get you a glass of water?”

  “No. I’m all right.”

  That had been two days and a few thousand miles ago and Remo was still worried about Smith, not that he cared really about the man’s well-being. Rather, Smith uncorked was like a violation of the universe as Remo knew it. Smith knew what the job could do to him, and Remo knew what his own waiting due-bill was. Still, to see Smith like that, well…

  Remo slowed the Rolls to pick up an entrance ticket at the toll booth. The late afternoon sun cast a reddish glow over the foothills around them. Only the smoggy pollution of the air reminded Remo they were still near a major city.

  “We have passed Brooklyn,” said Chiun as Remo sped into the center lane.

  “Yes.”

  “It would have been nice to see the street where she was born.”

  “Streisand?”

  “Yes. It would have been a blessed relief for a poor aging benefactor who has given so much to so unworthy a recipient”

  “Well, we’re not going back to Brooklyn, Chiun.”

  “I know,” said Chiun sadly. “I know that Brooklyn would be out of your way. It would be an inconvenience. And who am I to cause you any inconvenience, no matter how my heart longs for a bit of pleasure? After all, I am only the man who has transformed worthless cow dung into…”

  “Yes,” said Remo, attentive now, awaiting praise.

  “…into something barely adequate,” said Chiun. “In this world, there is no reward for excellence, for perfection. What a man gives, he gives, and from the ungrateful it never comes back.”

  “We’re not going to Brooklyn, Chiun.”

  “I know that, Remo. Because I know you.”

  On that, Remo knew he must avoid getting close to other cars. When piqued, Chiun had a habit of taking vengeance on passing vehicles. his long nailed hands would flick out the car window and snip an aerial or a rear view mirror off a passing car. Then Chiun would smile and wave at the driver.

  Remo felt the wind at the back of his neck and knew Chiun was readying his game. Remo managed to save a Volkswagen and a Buick but failed on a beige Cadillac Brougham whose driver waved back pleasantly with a smile. This robbed Chiun of his pleasure and Remo felt the wind cease on his neck. The window was up.

  “Little Father,” said Remo seriously, “I am worried. I am worried about Smith.”

  “It is a good thing to put one’s mind to the well-being of an employer. But not to worry. To understand.”

  “I think Smith is losing his balance and I don’t know what to do about it,”

  “The only thing you can do, my son. Your craft, taught to you as it was taught to me. Practice your calling.”

  “But…”

  “But this and but that. There is always a but to excuse a foolish move. You have one thing that you do better than any white man. You are not skilled in diplomacy or the civil service, nor can you lead hundreds of men. You are an assassin. Be satisfied with that. For if you fail in that, you fail in all things.”

  “I just wish I could do something, dammit.”

  “And I wish I could be a sparrow,” said Chiun.

  “Why a sparrow?”

  “So I could fly from here and visit Brooklyn before the ends of my days.”

  “You never let up, do you, Chiun? Never. All right. I promise you, when this thing is over, we will visit Brooklyn and find the house where Barbra Streisand was born. Okay? Okay? Does that satisfy you?”

  “We could turn around now,” said Chiun, “and get it over with so you would not have anything on your mind.”

  “I give up,” said Remo.

  “Then we are turning around?”

  “No,” said Remo.

  “You give up in the most peculiar of ways,” said the Master of Sinanju, and, having been denied a promised pledge, said not another word until the car reached the outskirts of Seneca Falls in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  REMO EXPECTED LITTLE DIFFICULTY in finding the training site, at or near Patton College.

  A training site had certain requirements you couldn’t fit in a one-room apartment. The Kalashnikov rifles the hijackers had used, for example. If you were going to fire them at something other than point blank range, you needed a minimum of fifty feet and an optimum minimum of one hundred feet. Ideally, a good range would be fifty yards.

  You also had to fire it into something other than a blackboard.

  For a terrorist, nerves were needed. The most common training was fire—going through it. Fires left scorches.

  Obstacle courses and plane mockups were also useful. In short, if there was any training going on, Remo would find the place.

  After recovering from his
shock that Remo had failed to find out how the weapons were smuggled past the metal detector, Smith had warned him that the terrorists’ training might be unlike any training that military minds were aware of.

  “Then they’ll leave traces unlike those from any other training. Relax, Smitty. They’re dead meat. Okay?”

  It was a small campus and Remo strolled it alone. Chiun claimed he was exhausted from the trip, but Remo knew if Chiun had thought there would be anything of interest on an American college campus, he could have stayed awake a week if he wished. It was no magic trick, just an ability to sleep in shorter periods more continuously, the use of odd seconds instead of hours.

  Naturally Patton College had a Fayerweather Hall. Every campus seemed to have one. The administration building was little more than a shack but the main buildings rose brick and aluminum modern, forming squares around large green lawns.

  Remo was sure training wouldn’t be on the lawns but he strolled them anyway. Not a divot. A few of the coeds eyed him and he smiled back, not an encouraging smile but a recognition of their interest. He would have liked to have gone to a college like this and when he had been a living person with an identity, a patrolman on the Newark Police Force, he had enrolled in an extension school at Rutgers. He couldn’t afford to go to a school like this in the daytime. If he had, who knew, maybe he never would have been recruited by CURE and maybe he would have a wife and family by now.

  He knew, however, that the attractiveness of a family existed only because he didn’t have to endure one. Still, it would be nice to know that children would carry on the name. Hell, he didn’t even have one, other than his first name, and being an orphan, he wasn’t all that sure that either name—Remo or Williams—really belonged to him.

  He wandered into the gym. A gym would be an ideal place. A man with a pot belly and a whistle stood on the side watching about fifty, mostly beefy athletes, go through set exercises. He was in his late forties and wore a baseball cap. He had to be a coach. No middle-aged man other than a coach would wear a baseball cap, unless, of course, he was an admiral, and Patton College was landlocked.

  “Spring practice?” asked Remo.

  “Yeah,” grunted the coach. “Who’re you?”

  “Freelance writer doing a round-up on small colleges. Their use of gymnasiums and things like that.”

  “Hey, you,” screamed the coach. “Move your fucking ass, you lazy cunt.” He waved a clipboard at a young man who, Remo could tell instantly, was working incorrectly on a damaged knee.

  “We like to use our gym,” the coach said softly to Remo, “to build character. That’s the whole philosophy of Patton athletics. Hey, you, Johnson. You do those pushups clean or it’s back to the ghetto. You’re not in Harlem, anymore.”

  The coach took a brief moment to deny there was any racial friction on the team and he wanted Remo to print that. “We’ve got good boys here. Good boys.”

  Was the gym used twenty-four hours a day?

  The coach shook his head.

  Was there a rifle team?

  Nah.

  Martial arts classes?

  “Nahhh, that’s faggy. Give a guy a shot in the head and that’s it. You know, pow, in the head. With the fist. American. I don’t go for that gook stuff. Don’t print that, though. You can say we view the athletic field as a laboratory for building understanding. Hey, you, Ginsberg. You waiting for your mother to make that pushup? Let’s get into it. Petrolli! Get the grease out of your ass…Athletics, as you may know, constitutes an extension of the Greek philosophy of sound body and sound mind. It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

  “Have a losing season last year?”

  “Well, let me explain that. You see, we really didn’t lose if you look at the statistics.” Remo examined the walls as the coach went into a statistical explanation that would do justice to the wildest fantasies of a government economist. “So you see, on the whole, we’ve really had a winning season.”

  “Yeah,” said Remo. “Say if you should see an old Oriental guy anywhere in long flowing robes, don’t mention things like gook. Okay?”

  “Hell, what do you take me for? I know how to handle gooks. There was one here last week. I talked to him just like everybody else.”

  “Mighty white of you. Was he Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese? What?”

  “A gook.”

  “Well, now that you’ve got it down to a billion people.”

  “A gook’s a gook.”

  “I hope you never find out the difference. I hate to clean up bodies.”

  The janitor, for twenty dollars, confirmed that there was no rifle range, no explosions, no fires, no karate classes. Radical movements? Some. Did they meet anyplace special? No.

  The basements of the dormitories showed nothing, nor did the chemistry labs or the physics building, the Student Union, or even the banks of Cayuga Lake or the old barge canal which bordered two sides of the campus.

  They had to train somewhere. You don’t put people on airplanes with rifles without training, and you definitely don’t sneak .50 caliber machine guns past metal detectors without planning. And if this group was, as Smith suspected, part of the new wave of terrorists, they definitely had to have large amounts of space to create terrorist squads and guerilla armies. Not that that was done here in the halls of Patton, but if the training techniques were similar, there had to be plenty of useable space.

  Remo wandered back into the Student Union, glancing at the menu in the cafeteria. Enough starch content to stiffen the living. He took a glass of water and sat down in a booth near some students who, like many youngsters and older lunatics, had solutions to problems of the world. Invariably these solutions required levels of mass morality that would shame a saint. These levels of morality, to be immediately adopted by mankind, were usually introduced by words such as “merely” or “just,” such as “If only the police would just stop looking at brick throwers as enemies,” or, “If everyone would merely stop thinking of their own self-interest,” and, “Blacks just have to get together and think as one.”

  Remo sipped the water. The youngsters in the next booth had narrowed the solutions to man’s problems down to one. “Merely have everyone think of himself as part of one world family.” The methods for achieving this world salvation somehow included, as its initial action, emptying garbage cans at Fayerweather Hall.

  Remo closed his eyes for a moment. Had he been wrong about Patton College? Had the three skyjackers lied? He thought back to the plane, and tried to rebuild the scene in his mind. Seventy persons, terrified hostages. Four skyjackers, all with weapons. In his mind, he looked around the plane’s cabin. Nothing. Rows of seats. An old wheelchair propped against the wall in the back. Stewardesses looking tired and sweaty. But he should have found out how they got the weapons’ aboard. And he should have found out why the plane had gone on to L.A. Sure, Smith wanted Remo to deliver the money. But the hijackers had control of that. If they had told the pilot, land here or get your brains blown out, he would have landed. Why had they agreed to L.A.? It was almost as if it had been part of their plan. But why? He should have asked. He should have asked a lot of things. But he was sure of one thing. They had not lied about Patton College. Fear was the greatest truth serum of them all. So where the hell was the training site? Remo let his mind wander and as he did, universal peace seemed easier. Maybe he could start it by throwing an egg at the dean of women or something. Then he felt the vibrations of someone sitting down.

  “Bastards. The bastards,” said a young girl.

  Remo opened his eyes. A pert-faced girl surrounded by a strong shag cut of blonde hair was sitting across the table. She was crying.

  “The bastards.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The bastards. They won’t let me get a word in edgewise.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Remo without enthusiasm.

  “They never let me say anything. Especially when I have something
good. Robert and Carol and Theodore always do all the talking and I never get a chance. I had something very good. Excellent. But no one would let me say It. They just didn’t ask if I had something and they could see, if they looked close, that I had something to say.”

  “Oh” said Remo.

  “Yes,” said the girl, taking a paper napkin from a metal holder on the table between her and Remo. “I had a wonderful plan. All you have to do for a revolution is to kill the millionaires and the policemen. Without policemen, there’d be no police brutality. Without millionaires, there’d be no capitalism.”

  “Uh, who’s going to do all this killing?”

  “The people,” said the girl.

  “I see. Anyone in particular?”

  “You know, the people,” said the girl, as if everyone knew who the people were. “Blacks and poor.”

  “Just in America?”

  “No. The Third World throughout.”

  “I see. And what will you be doing?”

  “I’ll help lead it, but I’ll step aside for Third World leadership. I’ll be the catalyst to help bring it about.”

  “What if they don’t let you get a word in edgewise?”

  “Oh, no. Third World people are nice. They’re not like Robert or Carol or Theodore.”

  “You think a Zulu chief is going to let you outline his future for him?”

  “The tribal chiefs of Africa are only a remnant of neo-colonial exploitation and we’ll have to remove them too.”

  “I see. What, if anything, do you learn here at Patton?”

  “History and political science. But it’s really irrelevant I just cram for the exams to get an establishment piece of paper that says I’m legally allowed to teach. I mean, the paper won’t make me any better a teacher. But you know the establishment.”

  Remo toyed with the water glass.

  “You’re probably very proud of the hijackers…the revolutionaries who were killed recently.”

  “Are you part of it?” asked the girl, her button brown eyes widening in excitement.

  Remo winked.

  “Gee, I didn’t think anybody hardly knew they came from here. I mean, they weren’t students. You’re not a cop, are you?”