"What's the handle, good buddy?" a voice asked.
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"I tell you as I tell the others. People do not have handles."
"What do you call yourself?"
"What do I call myself or what do others call me?"
"What can I call you ?" the voice asked. The accent was dry Oklahoma and Remo marveled that no matter where you heard a CB-er talk, they all sounded as if they lived in a tarpaper shack on the outskirts of Tulsa.
"I call myself modest, kind, humble, and generous," Chiun said. "Others call me glorious, enlightened, wonder of the ages, and worshipful master."
"Quite a handle. Suppose I just call you modest?"
"Just call me Master, as befits my character. Did I ever tell you, medium tolerable buddy, that I used to work for a secret government agency?"
Smith groaned and pushed his head against the corner of the seat.
Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech was in the first of the fourteen buses spread out along the highway. He sat behind the driver, a headset over his ears, monitoring any calls that might be coming to him from home base.
The fifty men on his bus were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, and Bleech had relaxed discipline enough so that they were allowed to talk to each other. But not too loud.
His top lieutenant slid into the seat next to Bleech.
"Finally getting this show on the road," he said, in as much a question as a statement.
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"Yessir," Bleech said. "Men ready?"
"You know that better than I do, Colonel. They're as ready as we can make them."
Bleech nodded and looked out the window at the countryside rolling by.
"We didn't do a thing that they couldn't do in the regular army," he said. "If they wanted to."
The lieutenant grunted agreement.
"Twenty years I watched," Bleech said. "The army going downhill. Salaries going up. Morale down. Turning it into a country club. Civil rights for dog soldiers. All volunteers so treat 'em with kid gloves. And all the while I was thinking, give me this army for six months I could turn 'em around, shape 'em up, and make a real army out of them. Like Patton had. Like Custer had."
The lieutenant nodded. "Like Pershing," he offered.
Bleech shook his head. "Well, not exactly like Pershing. You know where he got that Blackjack nickname from?"
"No."
"He used to run a black outfit in the army. They called him Nigger Jack at first. No, scratch Pershing. But they never gave me the chance and then they all got their little asses in an uproar 'cause some civilians got shot in Nam, and here I was, all I wanted to do was make the army good, and I was getting thrown out on my ear."
"Soft," the lieutenant said. "Everybody's soft today."
"Then I got this chance, and these are the best troops I ever saw. Best conditioned, the best trained, the best disciplined. I'd march them into hell."
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"And they'd follow you, sure enough," the lieutenant said.
Bleech turned and smiled at his lieutenant and clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. "Someday," he said, "when this country gets itself all straightened out, they're going to strike medals for us. But until then we got to get our reward just from the doing."
His earphones crackled and he raised a hand toward the lieutenant for silence. He swung the small mike down from its anchor on top of the earphones.
"White Fox One here," he said. "Go ahead."
He listened intently for almost a minute, then said briskly, "Got it. Good work."
He snapped the microphone back up atop the headset and the lieutenant looked at him quizzically.
"Trouble?" he asked.
"We had visitors at the camp."
"Yeah?"
"They didn't learn anything there, but they must have gotten something somewhere else. They've been seen coming from Norfolk, following us along this road."
"Following us?"
"Looks that way."
"Who are they?" the lieutenant asked.
"Don't know. Three men and a woman,"
"What do we do?"
A small smile spread slowly across Bleech's face. It made him look like a Halloween pumpkin.
"We'll give them a welcome."
For over two hours, Chiun had been trying to
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convince everybody on the CB's forty channels that they should be silent for exactly seventy-five minutes so that he could recite one of the shorter works of Ung poetry. No one had paid any attention to his demands for silence and as Remo, following a report Smith had received from a roadside phone call, turned onto a dirt road near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Chiun was yelling threats and insults into the CB in Korean.
Hidden in the hills bordering the road a half mile away, three soldiers saw the white Continental kick up a puff of dust as it came off the pavement into the narrow road.
"He always like this when he travels?" Ruby asked Remo, jerking her thumb toward Chiun.
"Only when we're going someplace he doesn't want to go."
"What's he saying now?" Ruby asked. Smith sat up nervously. Whenever Chiun spoke Korean, Smith worried that he was giving away the last few secrets that remained to the United States Government.
Remo cocked an ear. "He is telling that moderately acceptable buddy that the only difference between him and cow droppings is that cow droppings can be burned in a fire."
Another voice squawked and Chiun squawked back. "And he's telling that one," Remo translated, "that he should drink sheep dip."
Remo bumped along the pocked dirt road in the soft-sprung Continental while the screeching continued from the back seat and Ruby covered her ears with her hands to muffle the noise.
Suddenly, Chiun was silent. Ruby turned in her seat to see what had stopped the noise in the car,
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but as she turned, Chiun dove past her, across the front seat and grabbed the steering wheel from Remo with his left hand.
He gave a sharp yank and the car swerved to the right, almost at a ninety-degree angle, moving off the narrow roadway and toward a tree. At the last split instant before it hit the tree, Chiun forced the wheel back in the other direction.
Remo looked at Chiun, his mouth open to question him, when there were two explosive thumps, in close succession, in the roadway behind them. The car was hit with flying rocks and dirt and clouds of dust and acrid smoke swirled up on the road.
"Mortars," Remo yelled. He tromped down heavily on the gas pedal, took the wheel back, and sped down the road.
Chiun nodded, as if satisfied, and slid back to his seat. Smith was looking through the rear window, as the dust cleared, at the two holes in the roadway, each the size of a beer barrel.
Remo began to let the car slow down.
"Do not reduce speed yet," said Chiun. "There is another to come."
"How you know that?" asked Ruby.
"Because good things always come in threes," Chiun hissed. As Ruby watched, he seemed to narrow the focus of his eyes, as if staring at a point only inches in front of his nose, then he looked up and said sharply, "Steer left, Remo. Left."
Remo swerved the car sharply to the left and slammed the gas pedal down into passing gear. The car's nose lifted and it careened down the road. There was an explosion behind them that
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lifted the right side of the car up off its wheels for a moment, but Remo easily pulled the car back under control.
Chiun opened the rear window on his side and listened intently for a few seconds.
"That is all," he said. Without a pause, he picked up the CB microphone again and resumed screaming into it in high-pitched Korean.
"How'd he do that?" Ruby asked.
"He heard them," Remo said.
"I didn't hear them," said Ruby.
"That's 'cause you've got ears like Brussels sprouts."
"How could he hear them when he was yelling all the time into that radio ?" Ruby asked.
"Why not?" said Remo. "He knows what he's yelling into the radio; he doesn't have to listen to that. So he was listening to everything else and he heard the mortars."