Destroyer 017 - Last War Dance

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THE DESTROYER: LAST WAR DANCE

Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

For Geri Flynn, who remembers Chiun in the gray sweater, and for the glorious House of

Sinanju, P. O. Box 1149, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

CONTENTS

•CHAPTER ONE

•CHAPTER TWO

•CHAPTER THREE

•CHAPTER FOUR

•CHAPTER FIVE

•CHAPTER SIX

•CHAPTER SEVEN

•CHAPTER EIGHT

•CHAPTER NINE

•CHAPTER TEN

•CHAPTER ELEVEN

•CHAPTER TWELVE

•CHAPTER THIRTEEN

•CHAPTER FOURTEEN

•CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

Twenty-five feet down they began hitting the bodies. The big scoop that had followed

the workers down into the Montana earth, devouring the loosenings of dynamite and

pick, spilled out bones from its soil-dripping jaws.

Cracked skulls there were, large and small and some so tiny they looked as if they had

come from the necks of monkeys. Limb bones, some cracked, some whole, some

smashed into sharp white fragments. You could walk in the crunch of bones that dry

summer afternoon in 1961.

The workmen asked if they should stop.

"No," said the government supervisor from Washington. "I don't think so. I'll check,

though. Jeez. All in one bunch, huh?"

"So far," said the foreman. "In the last scoop."

"Jeez," said the supervisor again and disappeared into his gray trailer, where everyone

knew he had a telephone without a dial that he didn't talk about and a safe hidden

under his bunk that he didn't talk about and an assistant who carried a .45 automatic

and didn't talk to anyone.

The foreman turned to the workers, who had been standing around waiting for a

decision. "Whaddya want from me, already?" he asked in accent that was strange for

the prairie country. "You know what kind of a contract dis is. Who else digs hundred-foot

holes in da middle of prairies? Don't waste your time waiting for the supervisor. Don't

even wait for him. He's going to say, 'Go back to work.' Guaranteed. When he come out

of dat trailer, he's going to say, 'Go the other seventy-five feet.'"

A crane-operator climbed down from the cab of his crane and picked up what looked like

a fragment of a whitish bowl.

"Who could do such a thing? Who'd wanna do such a thing?" he asked, looking at the

remnant of the small head, which fit into the palm of one hand, and at the cracked hole

in the back of it. Then he started to cry. He placed it gently on a small rise and refused

to dig farther.

"You gotta," said the foreman. "It's part of da contract. No stoppages are allowed on

dese kind of contracts. They'll pull your union card."

"You can take your contract and wipe your nose wit' it! Dat crane don't go no farther,"

he wailed in heavy Brooklynese.

Other machines stopped, and picks stopped, and there was silence in the prairie.

The government supervisor came running out of the gray trailer. "It's all right. It's all

right. It's all right," he shouted. "Go ahead. Don't worry about the bones. They're

hundreds of years old."

"You hear dat?" yelled the foreman into the hole. "He says the bones are hundreds and

hundreds of years old."

"Then how come dere's a piece of lead in dis skull and a small hole in it? How come,

huh?" yelled back one of the workmen. "And here's a woman's beads or something.

How come da bullet?"

"Maybe she fell on a piece of lead. How should I know?"

"It ain't hundreds of years."

"So if it's yesterday, already, what do you care?" yelled the foreman.

"Because I care," said the worker.

"You'll never work on one of these again," the, government supervisor said angrily. "But

all right. If you men have to be shown, we'll find someone who will explain to you that

we're not just ignoring a mass murder."

Late that afternoon a U.S. Air Force helicopter settled down on the site, and a white-

haired man with a magnificent tan got out. He spoke with the soft quiet of authority and

the simplicity of real expertise. There had not been one mass murder there, he said, but

two. They had happened thousands of years apart.

The later one occurred in 1873—one of the last Indian battles, if it could be called a

battle. A U. S. Cavalry troop searching for a Sioux raiding party came across the peaceful

Indian village of Wounded Elk and massacred the men, women, and children. Hence the

bullets in some of the skulls.

This happened at the time when the government was first becoming ashamed of its

treatment of the Indians. So the massacre was kept quiet, and the punishment for the

cavalry troop was to dig a hole fifty feet deep and bury the incriminating evidence.

But at twenty-five feet they discovered older bones, and the captain ordered them to dig

no farther but to bury the victims at that level.

"Where'd da older bones come from?" demanded the crane-operator.

"Well, do you see that child's skull over there on that little mound?" asked the white-

haired man, pointing to the head that had brought the recent tears. "It was killed in

Indian fashion. They would grab a child by its feet and bash its head against a rock."

The crane-operator looked disgusted. "Dat's awful," he said. "When'd dat happen?"

"The best estimate is between ten and fifteen thousand years ago. Those are rough

parameters, but in this prairie, twenty-five feet down equals roughly fifteen thousand

years. Indians didn't bury their massacres beneath the ground you see. They left them

on ground level." His voice carried that little dancing joy of amusement, but there was

no other amusement at the deep prairie hole.

Eyebrows were furrowed, and the eyes of these men with rough, weathered faces

showed deep pity. Fifteen thousand, a hundred thousand years meant little when they

thought about someone swinging a baby by its feet to bash its head against a rock.

"In da later massacree," began a man, leaning thick arms on the handle of a pick, "the

one with da calvary… how come youse guys know about it, when da government

wanted to keep it like, secret, you know. How come?"

"Yeah, how come?" asked the crane-operator.

The white-haired man smiled as if a clear fact were always a pleasure, even when it

concerned the murder of a baby. "It is in the archives of the old Department of the

Army, which is now the Department of Defense. We knew where this site was, but we

didn't think you'd hit it exactly. The odds against hitting it exactly were millions to one,

considering the original location was fixed by star and by very distant landmark. This is a

big, big prairie."

"Yeah. You can say dat again. I ain't sure where da hell we are," said the crane-

operator.

"You're not supposed to," said the foreman. "Whaddya think, dey got us city guys on dis

job because dey like Brooklyn or something? A shit-kicker might know just where he is.

C'mon. Let's go. You got your answer. Back to woik."

The crane-operator returned to his cab, and other machines started. The helicopter left

the prairie, where there was again the hammering noise of civilization.

The workmen continued for two weeks, digging to exact specifications, and then went

on to another site, hundreds of miles away, where they dug another hole, whose only

purpose was to confuse them about the location of the first.

The supervisor from Washington and his quiet assistant with the gun stayed on at the

first hole. After the excavators came the men who built the metal structure for the

concrete. And after the concrete was poured, a perfectly round hole hardened exactly

one hundred eleven feet deep in the Montana prairie. The supervisor and the man with

the gun stayed on.

After the concrete came the skilled technicians who completed the wiring for the giant

underground silo. And after them, in three stages, on Air Force flatbed trucks, came the

missile. Putting it in place was like constructing an eleven-story building underground

with a jeweler's loupe. This too was completed, and the supervisor and the man with the

gun watched the technicians go.

It was winter when the large box came in the tractor-trailer. The driver was the white-

haired man who had answered the diggers' questions. His tan was still magnificent.

When he entered the gray trailer, the government supervisor stood to attention.

"General Van Riker, sir," said the supervisor.

The white-haired man blew the chill from his fingertips. He nodded toward the safe,

whose dial peeked out from under a bunk.

"Do you understand all that?" he asked.

"I've had time to study it, sir," said the supervisor.

General Van Riker looked to the quiet man who carried the gun. The man nodded.

"All right," said Van Riker, lowering himself lightly into a folding steel chair. "You know,

we almost canceled during that bone incident. You should have prepared for the

possibility of the bodies. I shouldn't have had to come here before I was supposed to."

The government supervisor raised his hands in a shrug. "For all the workmen know, this

is an ordinary missile with an ordinary head. They were spooked by the bones, that's all.

The crane-operator held a little funeral for one skull, I think, the day after you left."

"I know they think it's an ordinary ICBM. That's not the problem. I just don't want this

to be the silo they remember. That's why I've sent them all over these prairies, digging

more holes. Just to confuse them. But that's neither your worry nor your fault."

General Van Riker nodded to the safe again. "C'mon, we'll need that."

From the safe the supervisor brought two clipboards with notes and diagrams. General

Van Riker recognized them immediately. He had written them. He had never

commanded so much as an infantry platoon or a single airplane, but he had written

those plans. And on the day he devised a two-man, two-day all-weather installation of

an underground missile—as opposed to the usual method requiring multitudes and

weeks and ideal conditions—he had been promoted to lieutenant general in the United

States Air Force from a laboratory in an Atomic Energy Commission installation.

Before he had left his civilian post in the AEC lab, Van Riker had also designed something

else—what one think-tank scientist called "the loser warhead" because "you use it when

you lose one of two things: a world war or your sanity."

Now in this Montana prairie Van Riker was bringing both his theories together.

The supervisor donned his cold-weather gear, and with the clipboards under one arm, he

joined General Van Riker and stepped out into the subzero winter night.

The quiet man who carried the gun watched the two go to the truck and back it up to

the tarpaulin-covered silo. He turned off the light in the little trailer to let his eyes adjust

to the darkness but all he saw was a large metal arm extending from the back of the

van. A large, dark canopy seemed to glide slowly along what appeared to be a pulley

device on the arm, finally stopping over the tarpaulin.

In the morning the quiet man saw that the dark canopy was a small air-filled workshed.

Van Riker and the supervisor emerged only to grab a few hours sleep when darkness fell

again. Then they went back to the canopy workshed.

On the second day when darkness fell again, General Van Riker returned to the trailer

and said to the quiet man, "Go ahead. Do you want a drink first?"

"Not during work," the quiet man said.

"How about after?"

"I drink bourbon. Make it a double." The quiet man unholstered his .45 caliber

automatic, checked the clip and the chamber, dry-fired it once, then returned it to its

shoulder holster with the safety off.

"I know you drink bourbon," said Van Riker. "You drink a lot of it."

"Not when I'm dry."

"I know that, too. You have long periods of abstinence. You're very capable of it."

"Thank you," said the quiet man.

And Van Riker smiled his joy-of-fact smile, the same smile that came from knowing that

the Montana prairie contained the bones of two massacres and that at twenty-five feet

in this prairie the original bones must be about fifteen thousand years old.

Outside, the quiet man felt the chilling nip of the Montana winter night, felt the canopy

of ice-clear stars above him, and crunched his way forward in moonlight so bright he

could almost read in it.

"Oh" was all he said when he saw the site. Where the tarpaulin and then the workshed

had been was now a huge block of marble five feet high and stretching almost fifty feet

across. A giant block of statuary marble in the middle of a prairie. Rising about a foot and

a half above it was something dark. He went to the marble, which came up to his chin,

and saw that the something dark appeared to be a round brass cylinder.

"Up here," came the supervisor's voice. "I'm up here. General Van Riker said you're

supposed to help."

When the quiet man hoisted himself up onto the block of marble, he saw that he was

standing next to a giant bronze circle, which appeared to have raised letters.

It was a giant plaque. It felt funny to walk across the lettering. He had never walked on

a plaque before, and he wondered absently whether the raised letters were cutting into

the soles of his boots.

He motioned to the supervisor that he wanted the clipboards, then took them silently

and clipped them securely to his belt.

"Van Riker said that when I gave you those clipboards, you would explain the reason for

those two holes over there," said the supervisor, pointing to the other side of the marble

base, where there were two dark holes, three feet in diameter, like mini-silos. "There's

no reason in these plans for them, But General Van Riker said they were essential and

that you'd tell me."

The quiet man nodded for the supervisor to accompany him across the plaque to the

holes.

"Will you say something?" demanded the supervisor angrily. "Van Riker says you're

going to give me an explanation. I told him it would be the first time I ever heard you

talk. Now, talk."

The quiet man looked at the three-foot holes and then at the supervisor he had lived

with for so long without looking, without talking, making an effort not to listen to

anything more important than a request to pass the salt. He had even stolen the picture

of the supervisor's family that had been on his desk because he did not wish to look at

the three young boys and smiling woman. He had thrown the picture, frame and all,

into the maximum-disposal bags that were burned at the site every day.

"There's a reason why I didn't talk to you all this time," said the quiet man. "I didn't

want to get to know you."

He brought the .45 out of his shoulder holster and put the first bullet between the

supervisor's eyes. The heavy slug sent the head snapping back, as if a baseball bat had

collided with it. The body followed. The supervisor hit the plaque. The body twitched

violently and then was still. The quiet man returned the gun to the holster but did not

put on the safety catch.

He dragged the supervisor's feet over to one of the holes on the side of the marble

monument, then dropped the feet over the edge. He grabbed the shoulders and pushed

them toward the feet, and the supervisor's corpse slid down into the hole, his head only

eighteen inches from the top of the bronze plaque, which looked like a giant blowup of a

penny atop a match box.

When the quiet man reached for his .45 again, he felt the wetness of the handle and

realized his hands were covered with blood. He knelt on the plaque and leaned down into

the hole, the gun stretched out in front of him. When it touched the supervisor's head,

he fired three times. The splattering bone fragments, brain, and blood gushed up into

the quiet man's face as he fired the last rounds of certainty.

"Shit," he said, putting the sticky gun back into the holster.

"Did he fight back?" asked General Van Riker when he saw the bloody face and right

arm of the quiet man.

"No. I just got some of him back at me when I put in my certainty shots. It's a mess."

"Here's your drink. Without ice because I figured you had enough cold out there. The

clipboards, please."

The quiet man took the glass and looked at it. He did not drink.

"How come there are two holes, General?"

"The other is kind of a filter chamber for the first one. Bodies tend to rot and smell, you

know."

"Well, I was thinking… since you're obviously the guy who designed that missile

warhead… I mean, I'm no expert on missiles, but I know that two men in two days

don't install ordinary warheads. I mean, that had to be some kind of specially designed

warhead. As little as I know, I know you don't arm a missile like you put a bullet in the

chamber of a gun."

Van Riker interrupted. "So what you're saying is you think that anyone who could

design that sort of easily installed warhead could certainly design a single burial cylinder,

and you suspect the second cylinder is for you. Correct?"

"Well, yeah. Correct."

"And you think we killed the supervisor like the pharaohs used to kill the workers who

constructed the pyramids."

"Well, sort of."

"Do you know what kind of warhead that is?" asked Van Riker.

"No."

"Do you know whether it's even nuclear?"

"No."

"See? You don't know enough to be killed. All you know is that it's something special

and where it is. And even the pharaohs didn't go around killing people who only knew

where the pyramid was located. Frankly, if I were capable of killing, don't you think I

would have handled the supervisor myself? Why would I need a man from your

agency?"

"Well," said the quiet man who still had not brought the glass to his lips.

"I see," said Van Riker. "You have been trained to be thorough beyond thorough, and

you defend yourself as though others do the same. Like firing several shots instead of

one. I heard you." Van Riker nodded thoughtfully and slowly took the glass of bourbon

from the quiet man. He drank half of it.

"Okay?" he asked giving back the glass. "Not poisoned."

"Okay," said the quiet man, but when his glass was filled again, he did not drink until

the General had first taken a drink from it.

"It's this whole thing," he explained apologetically. "It's been spooky since the

beginning. From the bones on, it's been spooky. I mean it was bad enough having to live

for so long with a man I was going to kill, but I can't tell you what those old bones did to

us. Little babies! Those Indians must have been something, General."

He drank deeply and became mellow. He had not spoken to anyone for months.

General Van Riker listened, said that yes, the old Indians were indeed something, and

suddenly snapped his fingers. "Oh, no. We forgot the seal. It's got to be sealed

immediately. I was so upset over what you looked like—the blood and everything—I

forgot about the seal. We've got to put it on right away. Come on."

The quiet man steadied himself against a small table He weaved a bit and tried to focus

his eyes better. It had been a long time since he had indulged himself.

"You know, General Van Riker, you're not real military, but I like you, buddy," he said,

then poured himself another half-tumbler of bourbon and drank it down in one long

gulp. "One for the prairie, heh, heh."

Van Riker smiled benignly and helped the man from the trailer.

"One more for my baby and one more for the prairie," sang the man who had been

quiet for so long. "One more for my baby and one more for the road or prairie or missile

site. One more for the pyramids. You know, Van Riker, I fucking love you, baby. Not

queer love or anything. You know. You're the greatest fucking guy in the world."

Van Riker helped him up onto the giant marble base of the monument. "I'll lower the

cap out of the truck," he said.

"Yeah. Fucking do that. Good idea. Lower the cap out of the truck." And the once quiet

man began to sing a tuneless chant about lowering caps out of trucks all day and old

man missile, he don't do nothing, just sits in his hole awaiting a button, old man missile,

he just keeps waiting along.

"Hey, General, sweetheart, I'm a songwriter," he yelled, but he could not remember the

lyrics, and besides, the metal arm extending from the truck over the plaque was sending

out something. From the bottom it looked like a giant flattened barbell, and when it was

over the two holes, he saw the two round caps would fit exactly. A long wire lowered

from one cap.

"Attach the wire to the bottom of one of the cylinders," yelled Van Riker.

"One of the cylinders is full."

"The empty one, then."

"Sure, old buddy." And in his revelry he grabbed the wire with both hands and jumped

into the empty cylinder. The wire came with him, whining from some sort of spool he

could not see.

"There's a hook at your feet," yelled Van Riker. "You've got to tie the wire on."

"Looking for the hook, old boy, looking for the hook," sang the once quiet man to the

tune of "Bringing in the Sheaves." Since there wasn't room to bend over, he had to

squat and feel between his legs for the hook. The cylinder was black and cold against his

cheek and back, skin-sticking cold.

When he finally got the wire wound around the hook, he heard something up above. It

was the whirring sound from the spool. The wire stretched taut, pinning him against the

cold metal side, and he saw the flattened dumbbell device coming down exactly over his

hole, pulled by the very wire he had tied to the hook between his feet. He was sober in

an instant.

He went for his gun to jam it between the cap and cylinder top, but by the time the gun

was out of its holster, the cap had closed solidly and the stars above him were gone. He

was in blackness now.

Up above, on the plain where Sioux war parties and U.S. Cavalry had once massacred

the helpless Apowas, General Douglas Van Riker climbed from the back of the van onto

the marble monument.

It now had an airtight headstone sealing off the two bodies, hopefully forever. On the far

side of the flattened dumbbell was the inscription, "Wounded Elk Massacre." On the near

one was, "August 17, 1873."

The letters on the missile seal, the huge central bronze disk, read, "Here, on August 17,

1873, a unit of the United States Cavalry slaughtered fifty-five members of the Apowa

Tribe. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the nation deeply regret this crime and now, for

all time, acknowledge its occurrence. February 23,1961."

Van Riker read the inscription. More than a decade later he would be horrified by his

choice camouflage. But at the time, he regarded it as so perfect that it was worth even

the lives of the two men buried inside the marble monument beneath his feet.

Van Riker heard a muffled ping beneath him. The once quiet man was trying to shoot

his way out. No matter. The bullet would probably spin around the burial cylinder until it

stopped in the man. He was dead. If not now, minutes from now. If not by his own

bullets, then by suffocation. It was unfortunate that anyone had to die, but this was not

an ordinary missile. Two deaths now could save millions of lives later.

For this was a nuclear age, and the life of the entire planet might depend on the security

precautions taken by men who controlled the nuclear weapons—of all nations. It was

not a question of a better gun. It was a question of whether life would continue to exist

on earth.

Van Riker had not worked so hard to design this installation for an ordinary missile. No,

this missile was the Cassandra, and because it was the Cassandra, only one living man

could know where it was and what it was. The supervisor had suspected this when he

had begun to realize how this missile differed from others. So out went the quiet man

with the drinking problem, who had been on the wagon for a long time. Even to this

detail had Van Riker planned.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen," he said, knowing no one could hear him on the Montana prairie,

"but there are millions whose lives will be saved by this. Maybe billions, because,

gentlemen, this device should save us from a nuclear war." And then he thought of the

layers of bodies he was standing on—bodies that had fallen there thousands of years

before Christ and then in 1873 and now in 1961. Perhaps if the rest of the plan worked,

there would never be another war, Van Riker thought.

He drove the truck along the dusty dirt road for about seventy miles before he saw

human life—the small Apowa Indian reservation. He left the truck in a military parking

field fifty miles farther east and without even checking to see if he had taken the keys

from the ignition, he caught a commercial liner for the Bahamas, where he had an

estate with very efficient telephones connected directly to the Pentagon.

By the time Van Riker felt the first warmth of the Bahamas sun, a new air attaché was

arriving at the United States Embassy in Moscow. He had a meeting scheduled in the

Kremlin and had specified some of the men who must be there. He had named some

scientists and military men and NKVD personnel, and—to the Russians' surprise—he

named a man whose identity they had thought was secret, a man whom even most of

the high-level NKVD foreign-bureau staffers did not know. Valashnikov.

Now, Valashnikov was twenty-eight years old—a good twenty years younger than all the

other Russian military there, so young that in previous generations other officials would

have assumed he was related to the czar. But in this generation, when they saw his

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THEDESTROYER:LASTWARDANCERichardSapirandWarrenMurphyForGeriFlynn,whoremembersChiuninthegraysweater,andforthegloriousHouseofSinanju,P.O.Box1149,Pittsfield,Massachusetts.CONTENTS•CHAPTERONE•CHAPTERTWO•CHAPTERTHREE•CHAPTERFOUR•CHAPTERFIVE•CHAPTERSIX•CHAPTERSEVEN•CHAPTEREIGHT•CHAPTERNINE•CHAPTERTEN•CHAP...

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