"During the time of rest, Chiun took Remo to an island in the new world Chiun had discovered. (See: Discovery of America, Emperor Who Would Not Serve.)
"And it came to pass that a total stranger came into Chiun and mentioning that Remo had been gone many days now bordering on weeks, said, 'Where has your son gone?'
" 'Son,' answered Chiun. 'Why do you say that?'
" 'Because,' said this simple but wise stranger, 'there is something about him that is so much your son. Or even your brother.'
"Here, from the lips of a third person, was proof that Remo, the pupil, was definitely of Sinanju even if he had been born, in the eyes of some, far west of the old mill."
"Yes, Mr. President," said Smith into the special device that would allow his voice to be scrambled. Only a telephone in the White House could unscramble it.
"He has been there for a week, sir," Smith said.
"Then why hasn't he stopped it?" the President said.
"I don't know, sir."
"Should I leave Washington?"
"I don't know."
"Well, dammit, Smith, what do you know? You run the organization that's supposed to know everything. What do you know?"
"He's on it, sir. And I don't know his methods. Only one other person does."
"The old Oriental? I like him. Use him too."
"I am afraid, sir, that according to the protocols under which I operate, you cannot order me to do things. You can only suggest or order me to disband. This was to protect the country from my organization in case a President should try to misuse it."
"I don't see how trying to save twenty million people from dying a horrible death is misusing your organization."
Smith knew that the death threats and that crazed Indonesian newsman trying to kill him with a sword had gotten to the President. He was not about to tell this distraught leader that the Oriental whom the President liked so much because he was old too had become difficult because Smith was using Remo when Remo should have been resting.
Smith was only glad that Remo demonstrated that even while he was at less than peak, he was still far beyond anything else in the field he might come up against.
So Smith assured the President that the Oriental was not needed.
"I will call you again only if it is absolutely necessary, sir. I don't think for the sake of our ongoing cover, we should be talking this much," Smith said.
"All right," said the President.
But before the day was out, Smith was phoning him. He had seen projected weather reports about a change in the jet stream and the President was going to have to leave Washington. The whole east coast would be in danger too.
Chapter Six
It was Indian country but the danger wasn't the Indians. They were the victims. The rolling hills where antelope and buffalo had grazed until the introduction of the rifle and cash for their skins, actually covered in their scenic beauty a bureaucratic foul-up so dangerous that every department had kept passing it to another department since the First World War.
Underneath grass, far beneath where gophers made their underground villages, were four square miles of nerve gas, the first containers put there in case Kaiser Bill didn't learn his lesson and America needed to use gas warfare in the trenches of France. But at the end of the Great War, later to be given number one, gas warfare was outlawed.
Like all the other countries with standing armies, America kept the gas just in case anyone else would violate the treaty. And then World War II broke out and new, more virulent gas was manufactured in case anyone broke the treaty in that war.
And then the cold war started and one never knew what Russia might do, so more new gas was manufactured.
And there was never a war in which America used gas, nor did any other country, no matter how base its philosophy, until in the Middle East an Arab country based on the principles of "compassion and justice" used it against a fellow Islamic country, based on "justice and compassion."
Like all the other civilized countries who had never used their gas in war, America had been making it since Woodrow Wilson and the Sopwith Camel airplane and had an awful lot of deadly gas. Acres of it. Miles of it.
In the early 1900s, they started stockpiling it with a friendly tribe of Indians in the Pakeeta reservation. The deal was one bottle of whiskey for one can of gas. The can would be buried underground and the Pakeeta would never even have to see it, much less smell it. The Pakeeta had the word of the United States government, a sacred promise from its leader and people. The gas was safe.
Since the Pakeeta chief had already sampled an awful lot of the whiskey the government would give just to store the gas on the Pakeeta reservation just south of Billings, Montana, he took the sacred word of the white man.
International relations being what they were, the entire Pakeeta tribe was able to stay drunk right up until the 1960s, when a new militancy overtook them. They were not going to store the white man's filthy weapons of death for his filthy body-destroying whiskey. They were touching their old roots again and demanded clear water and rich grazing lands and the pure sky of the great spirits. It was not the days of trusting, simple Indians anymore. The U.S. government could keep its whiskey. The Pakeeta wanted their dignity. They wanted cash.
They got the cash and they bought cocaine and whiskey, although the old-timers still liked the old government-issue whiskey better.
They continued to get chemicals in iron drums. One whiff of the sort of deadly gas that had been created could kill a man. A spoonful of the liquid allowed to mist in the air could wipe out a town. A quart would do a state, and the Pakeeta were sitting on four square miles of the drums and the original drums were rusting. Steel did that when buried in water-laden ground.
The steel had been doing that since Kaiser Bill and his Huns. The Department of the Army said it wasn't its problem; the Army had gotten rid of the gas. The Bureau of Indian Affairs wasn't responsible because that was a problem of the land itself and the BIA dealt only with the Indians; it had no jurisdiction under the ground. They kicked it over to the Department of the Interior, which launched an investigation and blamed the Army.
The drums rusted. Everyone knew they were dangerous. The government formed a high-level committee to investigate and make immediate recommendations. It was 1920 and there was enough gas underground at that time to wipe out Montana. By the time the committee was forming its final subcommittee to finalize its final recommendations, there was enough gas stored under the Pakeeta reservation to wipe out the United States and half the fish in the Atlantic, depending on how strong the winds were. It could also take out part of Canada and if there was a southward flow, settle Central America's problems for a good two centuries.
And then someone, as a little gift, sent a piece of one rusted drum to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and to the committee that was still investigating sixty-four years later.
In three mailrooms, every person was killed when the metal touched air coming out of its plastic package. In the fourth mailroom, a vent carried the scent to the second floor, where thirty-two people were left staring dumbly into space, their nervous systems wrecked forever.
The most frightening thing, however, was not the bodies but the note.
"Please check the metal. You will find that it was manufactured by the Rusco Steelworks of Gary, Indiana, in 1917, precisely for the Army. And that for one purpose: to store gas. We tried cleaning off the metal by immersion in chemicals but as you probably know by now, even the most severe chemical scrubbing cannot clean this stuff. We had to remove the metal to get the explosives into the drums. Quite a chore, considering everything had to be sealed airtight when we did it. But we're good at placing bombs. Ask the President."