Chiun glowered. Remo subsided. When Chiun merely shouted, he was blowing off steam. When he glowered, it meant a volcano was rumbling in warning. Remo decided he could do without a lava-and-pumice shower.
Cheeta's flat face returned to the screen. "In a furious, three-hour-long speech given this afternoon, Cuban President Fidel Castro promised swift and-"
Snow filled the screen with a swiftness and violence that caught them off-guard. It hissed and crackled. Cheeta Ching's mouth continued to make flexible shapes, but her words were drowned out. Then her face was gone, replaced by busy white pixels.
Chiun leaped to his feet. "What outrage is this!" he demanded.
"Easy," Remo said. "It's probably just a reception problem."
A moment later, it was clear that reception was not the problem.
A new face appeared on the screen. It was mostly beard-gray and curly. From a mouth hidden in all that unruly hair, a cigar about half the length of a Louisville Slugger jutted.
A meaty hand reached up to take the cigar from the mouth. And the mouth began speaking.
"Ceetizens of Miami!" it proclaimed in a distinctly Latin accent. "Ceetizens of the world! The Imperialists have declared war on Cuba and its magnificent Revolution. So be it! The Socialist Revolution now declares war on Imperialist interests everywhere! For every blow struck against our peaceful shores, a greater, mightier blow will be struck against the aggressor!"
"Crap," Remo said.
"Who is this man, Remo?"
"Don't you recognize him? It's Castro."
"He is ugly."
"I thought so when I was a kid, and I still think so now. "
The President of Cuba resumed speaking. He gesticulated with his free hand, with his cigar, and as often as not with his bearded head. The man looked spastic. His voice rose and fell feverishly, his accent at times so thick his words ran together and were indistinguishable from one another.
Worst of all, he went on and on for what promised to be hours, warning, threatening, blustering, and making Remo, less than twenty minutes into the performance, mentally wish for the return of Cheeta Ching, owl-screech voice and all.
"Why don't you change the channel?" Remo suggested.
Chiun tossed the channel-changer in Remo's direction and stormed out of the living room. His bedroom door slammed shut.
Remo ran up and down the channels. The same picture was on every channel. The same bombastic voice continued to pour out of the speaker.
"I wonder if this is what Smith wanted us down here for . . . ." Remo muttered.
Chapter 3
USAF Captain William "Trusty" Ayres III despised Cuba.
His hatred had nothing to do with the Cuban political system, its climate, exports, or people, whom he was reliably informed were both friendly and hardworking.
William Ayres III hated Cuba because the threat it presented to Florida meant that Ayres had had to sit out the Gulf War, flying coast-wise patrols in his F-16 Fighting Falcon out of Homestead Air Force Base on the tip of Florida, a mere ninety miles from the island of Cuba.
He could have been an ace by now. Would have been, he was sure-except that some Pentagon war-simulation computer had spat out a scenario in which Havana decided to side with Iraq and fly sorties against Florida pressure points, one of which was the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, conveniently adjacent to Homestead. Cuban defectors had sworn their on-board MIG flight computers were programmed for strikes against Turkey Point.
It had never happened. Oh, sure, Fidel had made a lot of speeches. But they were just the same old hot air.
So when the scruffy face of the leader of the Cuban Revolution appeared on the Homestead AFB rec room TV during a rerun of Hot Shots, William Ayres III impulsively threw a can of diet Dr. Pepper at the screen.
"Banana-republic jerk!" he jeered.
His fellow pilots hooted and shouted abuse at the screen. Some of them had flown combat in the Gulf. They lorded it over Captain Ayres. Called him "Rusty" Ayres, until he wanted to drain the oil from their engines.
"What's he sayin'?" someone asked over the raucous din.
"Who cares? The guy's a big windbag."
"Yeah. Just a dinosaur looking for a cushy museum."
Eventually, they settled down. Castro was going on and on as if he were spring-wound.
They listened attentively as the Maximum Leader of Cuba proclaimed, "We are surrounded by a sea of capitalism! But we shall prevail! History will vindicate us! Our cause is true! Our slogan will always be: 'Socialismo o Muerte!' "
"What's that mean?" Ayres asked Janio Perez.
"Socialism or death," grunted Perez. "I say death," someone else growled.
"Let's put it to a vote."
They never put it to a vote.
Instead the scramble Klaxon started yowling, and they were pelting for their waiting F-16s.
Ayres was first into the air. He received his vectors from the tower and realized he was being sent over the Gulf. Not the Gulf he had missed out on, but the Gulf of Mexico.
"This is it!" he said. "We're at war with Cuba. Damn!"
All thought of the glories of air combat drained from his brain. He was a professional now, doing the job his country had trained him for.
His radar picked up a single bogie, flying low on the deck. The Identify Friend or Foe transponder read it as unfriendly.
"Bogie sighted," he said. "IFF says Foe. Instructions."
"Splash bogie," crackled his helmet earphone. "Repeat: Splash bogie."
Captain Ayres initiated target acquisition. The headsup display IDed it as a MIG-23 Flogger. Cuban. Definitely. No one else flew MIGs over the Caribbean. And nobody flew down on the deck unless they were bent on attack.
Captain Ayres got a radar tone, locked on, and with a businesslike "Fox-1," launched his sidewinder missile. It erupted from his wingtip and flew true.
It was that simple. Lock, launch, and get the hell out of the airspace, as the MIG jumped apart in a nasty popcorn of flash and ash.
"Bogie splashed," Ayres said, his voice thin.
"Roger. Stay out there."
"Any others?"
"Negative on other bogies."
"Roger," said Captain William "Trusty" Ayres, who had now tasted combat and wondered why the taste was so metallic.
Chapter 4
Dr. Harold W. Smith controlled the most powerful computer network on the face of the earth.
Not the most advanced. There were supercomputers far more advanced than Smith's. Nor the largest. Smith had only a quartet of mainframes at his disposal. Oddly enough, they were secreted behind a concrete wall in the basement of his place of work.
Nor were Harold Smith's computers the fastest. Nor the newest. Modern technology had long outstripped their microprocessors and old-style integrated circuits.
But they were powerful. In this case, knowledge was power. Thirty years of maintaining the system-which had been upgraded often in the early years, but seldom these days for security reasons-had filled its vast memory banks with highly specialized data of specific value to Smith and his work. Long years of toiling behind his shabby oak desk under the shaky fluorescent lights in his Spartan office that overlooked Long Island Sound had enabled Harold Smith to crack virtually every computer net he might have to access in the performance of his duties.
The combined computers of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS, on down to the lowliest police department terminal in the most rural corner of the nation, were like open books, waiting to have their electronic pages turned by the unseen fingers of the anonymous Harold W. Smith.
Corporate computers, among the most rigidly controlled and protected, had surrendered their passwords to him long ago.
Government systems, despite continual upgrading and password updating, inevitably fell under the brute-force assaults of his keen analytical mind.