He returned to the operations room, where the small overnight rotation was waiting expectantly.
“We gotta give them the Big Ear,” Simonec complained.
His operations team groaned. “We’ll be defunct. We’ll be sitting here with our thumbs up our butts.”
“You think I don’t know that? I’m gonna take the heat for it, too, so you grunts are getting off easy. Now give them the Big Ear. Maybe this time it will actually come back to us.”
Colonel Simonec bristled at the laughter from his underlings. Maybe he’d take up disciplinary actions to fill the long hours ahead of him.
The new DOHS hangar at Yuma operated-behind a privacy-fence almost twenty feet high, which was a joke. You had to be deaf and blind not to see the airships that launched from there night after night.
Tonight, the black blob that floated gracefully from the hangar was the biggest black blob of them all. It moved faster than the others. It was absolutely silent. Nobody on the night watch failed to witness the black stain blot out the sky. Officially, of course, nobody saw anything.
Dawn in Arizona was breathtaking. The Sun On Jo reservation, a hundred miles south of everywhere, was surrounded by desert that a white man would have called desolate. Sunny Joe Roam was not a white man, and when he looked at the land awakening to the sun he saw nothing but beauty.
Until he saw the wreckage.
It was larger than the other wrecks, and spread widely in an almost perfect circle.
“Winner. Boy.”
Sunny Joe’s grandson was helping to rebuild a hogan wall that had collapsed. They just didn’t build hogans like they used to, Sunny Joe thought. Then he recalled that he helped build that wall the first time, when he was around about fifteen.
“Coming,” Winner said, but Winner didn’t come for some ten minutes. That’s how long it took for them to settle the next log into place. Sunny Joe didn’t grow impatient. Reservation time didn’t pass the way white- man time passed, and the reservation was a better place because of it. But Sunny Joe was wondering why Winner didn’t have his own reasons for hurrying himself up there. After all, he had to know what Sunny Joe wanted him for. Didn’t he?
“Son of a bitch,” Winner said when he came to Sunny Joe’s side and spotted the distant wreckage.
“I thought you brought it down, boy. I was going to chew you a new one.” Sunny Joe knew Winner well enough. Winner wasn’t a liar. He acted however he pleased to act and always took responsibility for it.
“This is bad news, Sunny Joe,” Winner said. “Smith’s ignoring Remo’s warning.”
“He must think we got something important up our sleeves, but what in the world could it be?” Sunny Joe asked as they strolled swiftly to the crash site.
“Whatever it is, it’s important enough to waste bigger and better spy drones on. I didn’t hear this one. Didn’t even hear it hit the ground.”
They stood in the circle of destruction. The curved, blackened plate that rested on the earth at the center of the circle looked intact, but every other component was in fragments.
“That’s why,” Winner said. “It didn’t crash hard. No crater. It touched down then burned itself to pieces. I guess the Sun On Jo engineers will never figure out its military secrets now.”
“Guess not,” Sunny Joe agreed seriously, “So why did it come down? Was it one of them throwaways?”
“No. Just the opposite, I think,” Winner said as he picked through the slivers of chips and circuit boards.
Sunny Joe Roam didn’t touch the stuff. It wouldn’t tell him anything. What he knew about technology was limited to stunt-man devices used during his years as a Hollywood daredevil. What he would have liked to know right about now was why the thing crashed, if Winner didn’t crash it. Of course, he thought with a wry grimace, who else could have crashed it besides Winner and himself?
Something gold glinted in the morning sun. The two men waited for Freya to reach them, and only Winner shifted his stance impatiently.
“My ears were burning,” Freya announced.
“We were just about to start talking about you,” Sunny Joe confirmed. “What’d you do here, little daughter?”
She pulled a long folded strip of leather from the back pocket of her jeans and allowed it to fall open. It was a sling.
“I hit it with a rock,” she explained.
“Freya, I asked you to stay away from those things,” Winner said. “You don’t know what this man is capable of. He’s a murderer. He’ll order your execution with a phone call, just like he orders these things sent out to spy on us.”
“I can protect myself.”
“Not against this man. If he thinks you’re a threat, who knows what he’ll do?”
When they reached the village again, the work on the hogan was at a halt and the meager population of the village was gathering. They knew about the latest spy device. They didn’t understand it, and that made them afraid.
Sunny Joe Roam didn’t like having fear brought to his people
When Sunny Joe had come back to the reservation years ago he found his people on the verge of extinction. A disease had killed off many of them, and there were no children. Any old man, especially an old Sunny Joe, needed to hear the laughter of children—it was the sound of life. When the plague was eradicated, Sunny Joe encouraged his people to bring new life into the reservation. There were new wives, many of them wooed on the Navajo reservation up north, and now there was the sound of children.
Sunny Joe Roam never wanted to feel the fear and the hopelessness that had sickened the air of the reservation once, not too long ago. He would not allow it.
“Sunny Joe, why’s this being done to us?” one of his old friends asked.
“You hold your tongue for a little while, Horse Mouth. I’m going to see about something I can do.”
“Sunny Joe,” Horse Mouth said more quietly, “does somebody mean us harm?”
Sunny Joe couldn’t answer that question, and everybody just got more scared.
The blue phone rang. Smith took it, expecting Chiun.
It wasn’t Chiun.
“Hello, Dr. Harold W. Smith of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, who is also the head honcho of a supersecret government agency called CURE.”
Smith felt his heart leap into his throat. “Remo, what are you doing?”
‘Yes, it is me, Remo Williams, a former New Jersey policeman who was framed for a murder he did not commit, then drafted into the organization called CURE. What I am doing is trying out my new cell phone. It seems to be working pretty well.”
“Where are you?”
“Where am I, Dr. Harold Winston Smith of Rye, New York? I am in Hollywood on the Walk of Fame. I came here to perform some vandalism. It’s just one of the ways I’m taking out my anger. Guess who I am angry at, Dr. Harold W. Smith?”
“Are there people around?”
“Lots of people. Here’s someone now. What’s your name, honey? Travistah? Nice name. Nice outfit. I’m talking to my friend Harold in Rye, New York. He’s with CURE. What? Quite a bargain, but no thanks.”
Smith wanted to hang up, but was certain that would make things worse, not better. “Travistah left. She wanted me to give her money to keep talking to her, Dr. Harold W. Smith,” Remo explained. His voice was modulated to carry far. “So, anyway, I thought I would give you a call and talk about how angry I am. I hope it doesn’t bother you if all these people listen in.”
“This is ludicrous, Remo,” Smith said, for want of something better to say.
“Ludicrous? Naw, I’ll tell you what’s ludicrous—Alan Hale Sr. gets a star on the walk of fame, but Alan Hale Jr.? Nowhere to be found. They snubbed the Skipper and that’s just wrong.”