"You are very understanding today."
"That time Smitty had to erase his computer data bases when the IRS swooped down on Folcroft probably crippled his ability to do deep background searches like he used to."
"You are undoubtedly correct, my son."
"Thank you, Little Father."
As they walked they came to a place where a screen of trees obscured their view of the pink shine that lay over the battlefield like an angelic aura.
Remo's face abruptly darkened. "That damn Smith!" he said suddenly.
"Remo!"
"He had no intention of finding my folks. Never had."
"Remo, what has come over you?"
"When I see him again, I'm going to shake the lame excuses out of him, and then we'll see how motivated he is"
"You are very childish, you know that?" Chiun fumed. "One minute you are well behaved and then next you are throwing a temper tantrum like a spoiled child."
"You should talk."
"Me? I-"
They passed through the pines and came upon Crater Field again. The pink glow touched their face like an angel's kiss.
"I am sorry I raised my voice to you, Remo," Chiun said, suddenly mollified.
"And I am sorry I got out of line, Little Father. You know I think the world of you."
"And well you should," Chiun purred contentedly.
Remo spotted a figure in a slip dress and beret. "Hey, isn't that April May?"
"Yes, she is sneaking away."
"Smith said to find out what she knows. Why don't we follow her?"
They returned to the screen of pines, their feet not disturbing the brown carpet of needles any more than did the passing daddy longlegs spiders that patrolled the area.
As they blended into the intermittent shadows, becoming hunters again, their faces lost their placid cast and they became hard of eye. But they said nothing.
MARC MOISE couldn't for the life of him figure it out. As chief communications officer of Operation Crater, it was he who miked the battlefield so that all enemy operations could be monitored. He had planted the mikes personally. Video cameras were not an option. They were too big to hide in the treetops without running the risk of detection.
But when the balloons landed, they carried remote cameras, and Marc was busy monitoring the feeds from those.
That was the worst part. During the balloon launch, he had been preoccupied inside the mobile communications van parked down the highway. After the balloons had been launched, Bob Beasley had entered the van, saying "Carry on" in a gruff tone of voice entirely unlike his usual avuncular one.
But since he was practically Sam Beasley reincarnate, Marc Moise had carried on.
When the first video feeds came in, Marc duly taped them for later analysis and evaluation. They showed Mickey Weisinger giving the performance of his insincere life and winning the crowd over.
It was the lights. Marc didn't know how it was the lights. But he saw the way the crowd had turned-just as the crying faces of children changed for the better when Mongo or Dingbat or any of those other twodimensional idiot grins flashed their way.
As it happened, the seated figure of Bob Beasley chuckled from the other console. "Give an American kid a choice between the keys to the kingdom of heaven and two free tickets to Beasleyland, and the little bastards will snatch up the tickets nine times out of ten."
The voice didn't sound quite like Bob Beasley's, Marc thought as he struggled to catch every word coming through his earphones.
Then his heart jumped so high in his throat he opened his mouth to let it out.
Bob Beasley emerged from the Crater and gave the cheering soldiers a hearty wave of approval!
"But-" Morse sputtered.
A chill ran down his hunched-over spine. Something was not right here. Bob Beasley couldn't be out at the field. Bob Beasley was seated at his back.
Marc got a grip on himself. This was some fluke, some nutty glitch. Maybe the figure he was seeing was some animatronic robot. Maybe the situation was too dangerous to risk the real Bob Beasley, valuable corporate spokesman that he was, in the field, and that was a double waving to the crowd. Sure. A double. The guy snapping switches behind him was the authentic Bob Beasley. That was it.
But the body language of the man on the field was definitely that of Bob Beasley. No actor was that good. Not when playing to an ignorant audience.
So, while pretending to do his job, Marc Moise turned slowly in his seat to better visualize the man in the console chair.
The face was turned almost away, but the flat cheek and a suggestion of a mustache were visible. It was frosty white. Bob Beasley's mustache was dark brown. It was said he dyed it to seem youthful.
He was talking low and vehemently into his mike, and the words he spoke were repeated by Mickey Weisinger, several miles away.
Then a cold gray eye rolled in Moise's direction, and a frosty voice said, "What the fuck are you looking at, Moose? Get back to work!"
Marc Moise shifted in his seat, trying to keep the contents of his bladder from escaping his body.
The man behind him was not Bob Beasley. That man in the field was. And the voice that had called him by the hated nickname, Moose, made the short hairs at the back of his neck bunch up and squirm.
He knew that voice. It was imprinted on his brain, a part of his earliest childhood experiences. It was the voice that had cheered him up on Sunday nights before a flickering TV screen and assured him that even though school started the next day, all was right with the world.
It was the long-dead yet immortal voice of Uncle Sam Beasley!
Chapter 15
Bilious black smoke was still rising above the Norman ramparts of the Sorcerer's Chateau of Euro Beasley when the first five-seat Gazelle utility helicopters swarmed over the theme park. They did not land. They merely dropped like clatter-winged dragonflies and moved through the park's airspace, cockpits sealed, pilots heavily goggled and gasmasked as their beating rotors whipped up and dispelled the combination of black camouflage smoke and pepper gas that lay like a pall over the so-called Enchanted Village.
When the helicopters had beat the pungent exhalation into harmless dissipating rags, the SuperPumas came floating in.
They did not land, either. Instead, red-bereted French Foreign Legion paratroopers rappeled down in full combat gear.
When their black boots touched ground, they deployed through the deserted Main Street, U.S.A., encountering no resistance.
Before a grid of video monitors Chief Concepteer Rod Cheatwood groaned and said, "We're screwed. They're onto us."
And he reached for the button marked Supergreen.
YEARS from 1995 learned historians would convene at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to settle the question of the root cause of the Great Franco-American Conflict.
They would argue and hold rancorous panels for five solid days and still reach no consensus, although there would be a memorable fistfight in the apple orchard adjoining the John Hay Library where one professor would repeatedly crack the forehead of a colleague against the ancient monument dedicated to the illustrious H. P. Lovecraft until he had won his particular point.
One side said it had all started with a mouse. A reasonable argument, since the Sam Beasley Company lay at the heart of the conflict and it had started with Mongo Mouse.
Another school of thought held that twentiethcentury French cultural chauvenism exacerbated a minor dispute until it erupted into a full-scale international imbroglio.
And a third said US. cultural imperialism naturally created the friction. America was as unpopular then as now, the visiting professor from Harvard pointed out.
None of them got it right. It did not start with Sam Beasley's famous mouse, any more than it did with U.S. cultural imperialism or French snobbery.
It started with Rod Cheatwood of Vanaheim, California.