Terror Squad Read online

  “Do I look like a cop?” said former Patrolman Remo Williams.

  “Gee, I don’t know, man, you could be. I mean, your hair isn’t long or anything.”

  Remo suddenly became very interested in the girl as a person. He asked her name. It was Joan. Joan Hacker, but Remo said that was the wrong name. She was starlight. She was truly starlight. Joan thought that was corny. Remo touched her arm and smiled. She thought Remo had a nice smile, but he could still be a cop. He smiled and listened. Starlight’s father was a chemical engineer. He was a male chauvinist pig oppressor who revoked her American Express card and went pigging around, begging for approval and gratitude, just because he footed the bill for this bourgeois irrelevant institution. Starlight’s mother was an unliberated woman who refused to be liberated no matter how hard Starlight tried.

  Starlight’s roommate was a nosy, aloof bitch who did nothing but paint her body to be attractive to male chauvinist pigs. Starlight’s professors, except for her sociology teacher, were backward bourgeois nincompoops. Her sociology teacher had given her an A because of her term paper on how to conduct a successful revolution. Starlight’s greatest ambition was to fight for the Viet Cong but since her father had revoked her American Express card, she couldn’t afford the airfare.

  Starlight was for all oppressed people and against oppressors. Starlight’s bust was a 38-D. Did Remo know that Starlight had taken the pill since she was sixteen?

  Starlight was outlining what America and the world really needed, later that afternoon in her dormitory room, when Remo gave her what she needed. Three times.

  Remo pressed her young nude body to him and waited for an expression of gratitude. Instead, he felt her hand run to reactivate the pleasure maker. She wanted more. She got more. Two more.

  “You really know how to get things started,” said Starlight.

  “Started?” said Remo.

  “You’re going to stop?” asked Starlight.

  “No,” said Remo and by nightfall, Starlight finally believed he was not a policeman. She lay cuddled in his arms, kissing his shoulder.

  “I believe in the revolution,” Remo whispered in her ear.

  “Do you? Do you really?”

  “Yes,” said Remo. “I think the heroes who died in the airplane to free oppressed people are Patton’s greatest contribution to civilization.”

  “They really weren’t matriculated,” said Joan Hacker. “One took night school courses and the others weren’t students.”

  “Go on,” said Remo, in amazement “You didn’t know them?”

  “I did, too. I supplied the coffee and food. I paid for the lunch.”

  “The lunch?”

  “Sure. It came out of my allowance but I considered it an honor. I suffered for the revolution.”

  “They had only one lunch?”

  “How many lunches can you eat in one day?”

  Remo sat up in bed. “They trained somewhere else and spent one day here, right?”

  Joan Hacker shook her head and reached up for Remo to return his body to hers.

  “Answer my question first,” said Remo.

  “No. They teamed in the afternoon, after lunch, and they left that night. Me and a bunch of other students who are liberated served the food and sort of stood guard. We didn’t hear what was going on but it was very exciting. And then we heard what they had done.”

  “Where did you stand guard?”

  “By the barge canal. None of us even saw the instructor. We didn’t know what they were going to do. But yesterday when all those people came asking questions, we knew it had been traced back here. What’s the matter? I felt your shoulders tighten.”

  “Nothing,” said Remo. “Nothing. I’m just overcome by the revolutionary ardor you show.”

  Remo was overcome all right. By a gnawing suspicion about Smith.

  “These people asking questions. Were they police? FBI?”

  Joan Hacker shook her head. “Funny kind of people. None of them said they were police. Are you all right?”

  “Sure, sure,” said Remo. Well, they were CURE people, elements from the vast network who didn’t know who they really worked for. Smith hadn’t been able to wait. He couldn’t wait for the two days it would take Remo to drive cross country. Remo remembered Chiun’s admonition, not to worry about Smith, but to continue plying his trade. He also remembered that Chiun had answers to things that stumped western minds. He would ask the Master of Sinanju how a person could be trained in just one afternoon. He would take him to the spot near the river that Joan Hacker had described, and ask Chiun, what had gone on here? And Remo would be shocked by the answer.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Joan asked again. “Maybe you’d like a little snort?” She pointed to a little metal canister on her end table.

  “No,” Remo said. “But don’t let me stop you. Go ahead and enjoy yourself.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I will. After all this, I think a little coke would be groovy.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHIUN DID NOT WISH to leave the hotel at night. The northern cold of the Finger Lakes district of New York was too much for a Korean. Thus he stated.

  “Sinanju goes to twenty below zero during the winter. You told me that yourself,” Remo complained. “And this is spring.”

  “Ah, but in Sinanju, it is a clean cold.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Remo, understanding all too well. The payments for not visiting the birthplace of Barbra Streisand were coming due.

  “Your ignorance is not my burden,” said Chiun and would say no more. A typical response, thought Remo.

  At dawn, Remo asked Chiun if he had anything against dirty mornings. Or did the Master of Sinanju need a clean morning to go with his clean cold before he would leave the hotel?

  Chiun refused to descend to pretty bickering and tendentiousness. It was enough that he was going to examine the spot along the canal.

  The morning sun over dew-fresh grass was refreshing, so they walked.

  “Little Father,” said Remo as they crossed an iron bridge over the canal, “I am confused.”

  “The beginning of knowledge.”

  “Everything I know about our skills tells me it takes time.”

  “Much time,” said Chiun.

  “Is it possible to achieve minimum skills in a day?”

  Chiun shook his head. A gentle breeze caught his wispy beard.

  “No,” he said. “It is not possible.”

  The bridge blended into a sidewalk, and they moved underneath a row of green budding trees with small houses set on oversized lots on both sides of the street. The fragments of front lawns were muddy. It had rained during the night.

  “Then how could inexperienced people smuggle a field weapon through a detection device, and learn the use of firearms in a day?” asked Remo. “How could they do such a thing?”

  Chiun smiled. “There seems to be a contradiction there, does there not?” he said.

  “There does,” Remo said.

  “There Is none,” said Chiun, and he explained.

  “Once, a long time ago, the House of Sinanju was summoned by an emperor of China, a cunning man, a wealthy man, a man of great perception but no wisdom, of great military victories but no courage. He was, in brief, not Korean in his virtues.

  “The emperor requested the services of the House of Sinanju. This was not the emperor who failed to pay for services, but the great, great grandfather of that emperor who one day would commission a Master of Sinanju and not pay, thus depriving the babies of the village of Sinanju of food,”

  “Yes, yes, get on with it. I know the story about the emperor who didn’t pay for the hit,” said Remo.

  “It is an important part of any story dealing with China,” Chiun said.

  “Little Father, I know that the village of Sinanju is very poor, and that it has no crops, and in order to get food for the children and the aged, you hired yourselves out as assassins, and anyone who doesn’t pay is
really murdering your babies.”

  “It is a little thing to you. They are not your children.”

  “That was over six hundred years ago.”

  “A crime, unlike pain, does not diminish with time.”

  “Right,” Remo said. “It was a horrible, undiminished crime, and no emperor of China should ever be trusted.”

  “Correct. But this was his great, great grandfather,” Chiun continued. “The emperor had a problem. He wished to wage a very special assault against a king beyond his borders. The palace of the king was on a high mountain. It could not be assaulted by soldiers without great loss. The emperor did not wish to lose many of his fine troops. But he had peasants, more than enough peasants, who in that year of crop failure would starve to death anyway. Could the world’s most illustrious and magnificent assassins, the perfection of mankind, the ultimate in what mere mortals might possibly achieve, in brief, could the Master of Sinanju train peasants to assault this castle so that prime troops would not have to be lost?”

  “The Chinese emperor called your ancestors the perfection of mankind?” asked Remo incredulously.

  “That is the way the story was told to me,” said Chiun.

  “But you said Chinese emperor is another word for liar.”

  “Even a liar must tell the truth sometimes.

  “The emperor said the special assault must be conducted within the month as the king had planned to move a great treasure out of the palace on the mountain. The ancestor of Chiun thought hard and long. What makes a warrior and what makes a peasant? Is it the eyes? No. All men have eyes. Is it the muscles? No. All men have muscles that can be trained briefly. Then why should it take years to train a good soldier? The Master of Sinanju thought and thought.

  “Why was the House of Sinanju superior to all other assassins? What made Sinanju perfection among flaws? What made the House of Sinanju respected and revered throughout the world?”

  “The House of Sinanju is known by maybe ten people today, Little Father,” Remo said.

  “This is the way the story was told to me,” said Chiun.

  “Then one day, the Master saw a soldier push a peasant off a road. The soldier was slight of build. The peasant was large and strong. Yet the peasant did not strike back. And then the Master knew what he could do, in a very short time. What was different between the peasant and the soldier was the mind. That was the difference. Only the mind. The peasant surely could have slain the soldier but he could not see himself doing it. His mind did not have it.

  “So the Master had artists draw pictures of the palace and the mountain. And he gathered the peasants before him and he spoke to them as they looked at the pictures. And as they looked, he had artists draw in their likenesses scaling the mountain, one on another. And he had artists draw in their likenesses killing the king’s soldiers. And he talked to them until he had them seeing in their mind that they could do this thing. And at the end they believed that not only could they do this thing, but already had done this thing. And he had them chant together the signals they would hear.

  “And so they marched from the emperor’s lands to the land of the king who lived in the palace on the mountain. And every day on the march, they chanted the orders to themselves and saw themselves scale the mountain.

  “And when the day arrived, they approached the mountain with the assurance of soldiers and scaled the mountain and overcame the fortifications, losing some men, but not as many as might be expected. This was due to the planning of the Master of Sinanju,

  “But lo, inside the palace, they fell to their knees because after all, they were peasants and had never seen the inside of a palace. And they wandered around, frightened and confused, and were slaughtered by the mere household guard, for they had not seen themselves inside the palace. They only visualized themselves assaulting it

  “So,” finished Chiun, “were they skilled or were they not?”

  “They were and they weren’t.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then these people are skilled and not skilled.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How can I tell that to Smith?” Remo asked. “He is already greatly disturbed,”

  “That will pass,”

  “How do you know, Little Father?”

  “I know. Did you not see his eyes or his fingers or the way he looks at the sky?”

  “Smitty never looked at the sky in his life. He never did anything but play with his computers. He’s a man without a soul.”

  Chain smiled. “Perhaps, but he is a man.”

  “No,” said Remo. “You’re not telling me it’s his time of life.”

  “Indeed it is,” Chiun said. “He suffers now because life is telling him it is the beginning of being over. It is almost over and he was never there. But this shall pass, because it is only a moment, and he shall return to the illusion that most men have: that they will never die. And under that illusion, he will return to normal.”

  “A bitter heartless machine,” said Remo.

  “Exactly,” said Chiun. “There are worse emperors to work for.”

  The sidewalk ended a few yards past the last frame house. Remo and Chiun walked along the side of the road, and if one watched them from behind, he would see that the American now walked with the gliding motion of the Oriental, their arms and shoulders moving as if they were twins.

  They turned off the road at a small dirt path that led through a stand of birch, and down a small hill. Both men moved effortlessly.

  “Tell me,” asked Remo. “Whatever became of the assault on the palace?”

  “It had a good ending. The Master led a small party to the treasure room and guided them into retrieving it. They made their way down the mountain and returned to the emperor with the treasure.

  “And the peasants?”

  “They were killed.”

  “How can you say it was a good ending?”

  “The emperor paid.”

  “If it was just money, why didn’t the Master just keep the king’s treasure?”

  “Because we are not thieves,” yelled Chiun.

  “You stole from the king!”

  With that, Chiun gushed forth a stream of Korean, a few words of which Remo recognized. Stupid. White man. Ingrate. Invincibly ignorant. Bird droppings, And one more, which Remo recognized from constant use. It was a saying of the House of Sinanju: “You can take mud from the river, but you cannot make of it a diamond. Be satisfied with a brick,”

  A large clearing loomed ahead and Remo pressed forward until he suddenly realized he was walking alone. He turned around and Chiun stood twenty feet behind him, near a large rock. There was a small clearing around the rock as if a deer had settled there for the night and nothing grew again.

  Remo motioned with his head for Chiun to keep up with him, but Chiun did not move.

  “C’mon,” Remo said. “The training site must be just up ahead. The girl said it was at the bottom of the hill.”

  Chiun raised a finger. “That clearing up ahead was not the place,” he said. “This was the place.”

  Remo trotted back to the rock and looked around. There was the rock, about twice the height of a man, the small muddy clearing that looked more like a widening of the path, and nothing else.

  “How do you know?” said Remo.

  Chiun pointed to a small flattened section of the rock at about his shoulder height. The section was smooth, about the size of a matchbook cover, and looked as if someone had chipped it away with another rock.

  “It is time,” said Chiun, “to leave the service of this emperor. Come, I can find employment for you, too. We must leave. There is always work for assassins. Do not worry about your income.”

  He touched his long fingernail to the flattened section of rock.

  “This tells anyone fortunate enough to know,” he said, “that the time has come to seek another benefactor, to serve elsewhere. Leave America to its own devices.”

  Remo felt his stomach knot, a breath sur
ge up into his throat.

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’d never quit when I’m needed.” But the Master of Sinanju had already turned, and was looking up toward the sky.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HENRY PFEIFFER WAS REARRANGING the price marker on the leg of lamb in his butcher shop window on Ballard Street in Seneca Falls when a coed from Patton College entered and smilingly told him he was going to kill two people.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said in an accent tinged with the gutturals of Bremerhaven, Germany, where he was born. “Who are you? What are you talking about?”

  “My name is Joan Hacker. I’m a senior at Patton College. And you’re going to try to kill two men for the revolution. Only you may not be able to, but you’re the best we can get right now.”

  “Uh, sit down, sit down. Can I get you a glass of water?” Henry Pfeiffer wiped his beefy hands on his stained apron and guided the young girl to a chair.

  “It’s really very simple,” said Joan Hacker. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. We’ve got to break eggs. I’m giving up a meaningful relationship, and I mean, meaningful. I may never get that much of a relationship again. But I’m doing it for the revolution.”

  “Perhaps some Alka Seltzer? Or schnapps? And then we phone the hospital, ja?”

  “Nein,” said Joan Hacker who knew a little bit of German. “We don’t have time. They’re a bit up the canal now, and you will have good cover before they reach the road, I got them there. I mean, I did most of the work. I would have told you earlier, but we didn’t want to give you much time to think about it. We wanted to wait for them to get there. We’re giving you cover. You ought to be grateful.”

  “Little girl, you will go to the hospital if I phone?”

  “No, Captain Gruenwald. S.S. Captain Oskar Gruenwald. I will not go to the hospital. I will wait for you.”

  Blood drained away from the heavy face, of the butcher on Ballard Street. He steadied himself on the clean glass case.

  “Little girl, do you know what you’re talking about?”

  “Yes, I do, Captain. You looked marvelous in your S.S. uniform. That’s all right. I don’t mind that you were a Nazi. We’re not against Nazis anymore, what with Israel and everything. Naziism was just another form of colonialism. America is worse.”