“Exactly,” Smith said.
The phone disappeared from Remo’s hands. “Emperor,” Chiun asked, “when you say all electronic devices. would stop working, would this include iBloggers?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Yes, Master Chiun, all iBloggers,” Mark Howard explained.
“Could one take steps to have his iBlogger shielded in special ways to protect it?”
“Perhaps, but we can discuss it later,” Howard said. “What we don’t understand yet is the reason for the kidnappings.”
“When is this EMC blast scheduled?” Chiun demanded. “Will it be tonight?”
“Give me that,” Remo said, removing the phone from Chiun’s hand.
“Remo!”
“Listen, Chiun, there’s not going to be an EMC blast tonight, probably never, and even if there was and even if you managed to get some special shielding so your iBlogger would still work, it wouldn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because every other iBlogger would be fried! Computers and toasters and every other damn thing with a computer chip inside of it, which is everything, would be dead. Reader’s Digest had a blurb about it.”
“So there would be no more blogs for me to read,” Chiun said with somber understanding.
“Yeah. But like I said, it’s probably not going to happen”
“What of television?”
“Televisions would all stop working, too,” Remo said. “Right?” he asked into the phone.
“Well, if you happened to have one without microchips in it, then it would still work,” Mark Howard explained. “You know, the old tube sets?”
“Where does one purchase old tube sets?” Chiun demanded.
“It doesn’t matter, Chiun,” Remo said, getting exasperated. “You’d have the same problem. Even if you had a TV that worked, there’d be nothing to watch because every TV station would have technical difficulties for eternity.”
Chiun sat back in his car seat, eyes full of dread.
“Can we get on with this?” Dr. Smith asked.
“Get on with it,” Remo said. “What’s with the kidnappings?”
“The staff of the AFCA station was taken, but that’s just the start,” Smith said. “Ninety-three human beings were taken.”
“And I know why, Smitty,” Remo said morosely. “They’re food. The cave guys are rounding up cattle.”
“I think not,” Smith said. “The albinos came to the surface with very specific targets. In Topeka they raided the offices of a dentist who happened to live in rooms above his practice. They took every piece of equipment they could carry and they took the dentist, as well. In Apache Flats, Missouri, they targeted a car dealership with twenty-four-hour service. They stripped it of portable tools and took the mechanic who was on duty.”
“Just like in the bunker,” Remo observed. “The hardware and the people to work the hardware. What are they trying to do, set up their own full-service civilization down there?”
“Remo,” Smith said, “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.”
Chapter 27
Gerhard’s Grunts were the meanest bastards you were ever gonna meet. It wasn’t a boast. It was just reality, and you might as well deal with it because you never wanted to call one of Gerhard’s Grunts a liar.
The grunts were in Afghanistan. They were in the second Iraq war, too, but as Gerhard himself would tell you, “That was a tea party compared to fucking Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan was deadly. Afghanistan was fucking hell. Maybe not for those pretty-boy Marines. They never saw any serious combat. Not for the Rangers or the SEALs. They spent that fucking war with their pinkies up their noses to the second knuckle. You wanna know about Afghanistan, you talk to the grunts..
When the spooks thought Osama was running around the lawless mountains, they sent in the grunts. When the Pentagon was certain Osama was hiding in the no-man’s-land on the untouchable side of the Pakistani border, they sent in the grunts. When the bombing was called off and they needed somebody to penetrate the unstable, miserable catacombs of the mountains, filled with decaying bodies and survivors who had fed on nothing more than their hatred of Americans for weeks, they sent in the grunts.
It was the catacombs where Gerhard’s Grunts made their reputation. They went into those rat holes and met with some of the fiercest resistance of the war. There were Taliban freaks who would leap onto them from ceiling perches and attempt to chew the grunts’ throats open. There were al-Qaeda toads who would sneak up on them and try to blow themselves up close to the grunts. Even if they couldn’t kill a grunt, they saw it as a success if they gave their life simply to blind or maim one of the hated Americans.
The grunts started coming out of the Afghan caves on stretchers. The wounded man would be latched on to an ambulance chopper basket, then the rest of his buddies would go back into the caves. The grunts began to refer to their cave, whatever cave they happened to be in, by one of the cruder four-letter words for a woman’s private parts. “And we’re the pricks you’ve been waiting for, so like it or not, it’s time to fuck.”
Everybody knew the grunts were in Afghanistan and suffered heavy casualties but didn’t lose a man. In fact, every wounded commando eventually returned to the grunts. When Gerhard himself was targeted by a BBC news correspondent after the war, she asked him; what his men had actually done in Afghanistan to sustain so much injury.
Gerhard sneered at her and said, “We fucked it.”
“So,” asked the stammering correspondent, “how was it, fucking Afghanistan?”
“Dry,” Gerhard said. “Painful. But we were the right pricks for the job.”
That interview never aired.
When word came down from the commander in chief that an insertion team was needed in Topeka soon, the military’s sharpest minds immediately thought of Gerhard’s Grunts.
By the time their transport was descending on Kansas, they had seen the video footage of attacks that had happened throughout the middle part of the nation. The footage showed swarms of freaky albinos committing theft, violence, murder, kidnapping and cannibalism.
As the transport plane touched down in Kansas, Topeka was just waking itself up. It was a cool, blue-sky morning, full of promise. The people were oblivious to the overnight violence. If the federal government had its way, they would never know. This was going to stop here and now.
A U.S. Army cordon surrounded the Paradise Caverns, with tanks and jeep-mounted machine guns, enough firepower to reduce the building to rubble.
Outside the Army cordon was a ragtag jumble of local police. A Topeka police official stormed up to the first of the grunts’ vehicles as it stopped for the Army checkpoint. He had a speech all ready—he had delivered it several times that morning. He started delivering the speech to Gerhard. It had something to do with the Feds not respecting the authority of the chief of police of a major metropolitan city. What was Gerhard going to do about it?
“Fuck you. Chief,” Gerhard answered, and they rolled into the protected realm where the local law was not allowed.
The grunts exited the vehicles, fully armed and fully prepared to move in. The Army officer in charge of the scene told him that there hadn’t been any sign of the albinos since the overnight attack. “If you’re lucky they’re long gone.”
“If I’m lucky,” Gerhard said disdainfully, “they’re inside waiting to engage. Battle is my job. What the hell is yours, soldier?”
The grunts went into Paradise Caverns, followed the route of the albinos to the cavern’s subterranean waterfall and started blowing up the rock. In minutes they revealed a hidden passage, then belayed over the cascade and marched into the earth, leaving behind the glorious Kansas dawn without a backward glance.