"What is your message, Professor Bluel?"
"I represent a return to the sanity of the sixties," Sky Bluel proclaimed. "I speak to the apathetic generation, challenging them to pick up the torch of our sixties mothers and fathers. It's not too late for us to shake up the world. And I speak to the unborn generations who are crying in the darkness, pleading to be born into a world without nuclear weapons."
"What rubbish," Remo snorted.
"What wisdom," Chiun sniffed, brushing a speck of moisture from one eye.
Remo looked down to the Master of Sinanju with an incredulous expression on his high-cheekboned face.
"She speaks eloquently of family values," Chiun explained.
"I speak most of all to the progressive elements of today," Sky Bluel continued, "who can further my cause."
"What cause?" a voice asked politely.
"The unnuking of America!" Sky Bluel cried. "What happened in La Plomo happened because barbarians got hold of the bankrupt and outlawed technology of poison gas. It is too late for the children of La Plomo. But it is not too late for the rest of us."
"Could you explain unnuking?" the notorious anchorman asked.
"I'll do better than that. I'll demonstrate it."
Sky Bluel stepped back to the low, rounded shape behind her. A white tarpaulin smothered it like a huge Gypsy crystal ball under a cloth.
Unhooking the guy wires that kept the tarp from being blown away, she clambered behind the shape, reached down, and like a parlor magician pulling a tablecloth out from under a place setting, whipped the tarp off.
The videocams surged closer. Still photographers snapped pictures. The lights reflected off a large silver sphere whose stainless-steel surface was a mosaic of circular indentations. It rested on a thick rough-cut wooden board studded with electronic assemblies.
The crowd "oohed" and "aahed" as they recorded the strange object for their news directors.
This went on for two full minutes, until someone thought to ask a question.
"It makes a great visual, Professor Bluel. But exactly what is it?"
"It's a neutron bomb," Sky Bluel said matter-of-factly.
This statement took possibly twenty seconds to sink in. Twenty long seconds while the videocams whirred and the still flashbulbs popped spasmodically.
Remo sensed the prereaction shift in the mood of the crowd before they themselves were aware of it.
"Come on, Little Father," Remo hissed. Getting no answer, he looked to his left. Chiun had already stationed himself well away from the crowd. He regarded Remo with a "What are you waiting for?" twinkle.
Remo stepped out of the way just in time to avoid the stampede.
"Neutron bomb! She's got a live neutron bomb!"
The crowd broke in every direction.
"I do not recall her saying it was live," Chiun remarked to Remo as they watched the crowd scatter.
"She didn't," Remo said.
The Master of Sinanju lifted an inquisitive eyebrow.
"They're reporters," Remo explained.
"Ah," murmured the Master of Sinanju, understanding.
* * *
Up on her pickup flatbed, Sky Bluel stood proudly before her neutron bomb. Her attractive face fell as her audience fled.
"Wait a minute," she complained. "I'm not through rapping yet."
"Oh, yes, you are," a surprise voice in her ear said.
Sky turned. Behind her, somehow, was a tall man in a white T-shirt with dark deepset eyes that made her go blank.
"Wow!" she said. Then, recovering, "Who . . . who are you? I mean, what's your bag, man?"
"I ask the questions. You answer them. Is this thing really live?"
"Sorta."
"Straight answers."
"The shaped charges are real, but there's no isotope in the core. That means it can explode, but it can't achieve critical mass and release hard radiation."
The man in the T-shirt was examining the device critically. "Where the hell did you get it?" he asked.
"I built it."
"You built a neutron bomb?" Remo Williams asked incredulously. "You!"
"That's the whole point," Sky said defensively. "If I can jury-rig one, so can any terrorist."
"We'll argue about it later. How do you disarm this thing?"
"Just pull out the charges by the handles."
Remo looked over the steel ball. Each oversize dimple-it reminded him of a big tennis ballcupped a handle. Remo counted roughly thirty handles. Each handle bore a simple keyhole.
He looked over to Sky. "Just pull. Is that it?"
"Yeah, like opening drawers." She shook a tiny silver key that hung on a braided chain from her neck. "I didn't bother locking them."
"Sounds too simple."
"That," said Sky Bluel impatiently, "is my point exactly. "
Remo called down to Chiun, who had drawn close. He was looking up at them with the cocked head of an inquisitive puppy dog.
"Better get back, Little Father," Remo suggested. "Just in case. I'm dealing with dangerous stuff here."
"I was dealing with dangerous stuff before you were born," the Master of Sinanju snapped. But he retreated to a reasonably safe distance anyway.
"You go with him," Remo snapped to Sky Bluel.
"Don't be ridiculous. I know more about this than you."
Remo took Sky by the wrist, spun her like a square-dance partner doing a do-si-do, and propelled her off the truck with an ungentle shoe in the behind.
Momentum carried Sky Bluel running to Chiun's side.
Remo grabbed the top handle and lifted it straight up. He exposed a long wire-frame cone with a blunt end. A white claylike substance bulged through the wire-frame mesh. The chemical scent of plastique tickled Remo's nostrils. Carefully he set the blunt cone off to one side. The second cone came out more easily. Gaining confidence, Remo went through the rest.
When he was finished, all that was left of the neutron bomb was a skeletal sphere of stainless-steel rings with a grayish metal basketball suspended at its core by struts.
"See? I told you," Sky Bluel called over to him. "Harmless."
But Remo wasn't listening to Sky Bluel. His attention was focused beyond her on the dark figures slinking up to the Army trucks. They had formed a human chain under the noses of the Army-who were preoccupied with firing up a stubborn compressor-passing canisters of decontamination solution two from man to man like a turn-of-the-century fire brigade.
"Damn," Remo growled. "If it isn't one thing, it's another!"
Chapter 5
Fabrique Foirade grinned as the DS-2 canister was thrust into his broken-nailed hands. He took the sloshing canister and twisted his bony hips. Momentum carried the heavy container to the next and last man in line.
The container left his hands. Chortling, he pivoted back to receive the next one.
Because Fabrique Foirade, treasurer of Dirt First!!, wore his hair over his face like an unkempt Pekingese, his field of vision was not what it should have been. This forced him to work by feel.
So it was by feel that he knew something had broken the chain he had so carefully set up to liberate the dangerous DS-2 solution from the pig ecocide Army. He accepted the next container, and as he horsed it around, it came back at him, almost knocking him off his feet.
"Oof! What's this?" he asked, dumbfounded.
"New game plan," an unfamiliar voice hissed. "We're returning the empty cans so the Army won't know they're gone."
"The pig Army, you mean," Fabrique said reflexively.
"Right, right," the other said vaguely.
Behind his matted curtain of hair, Fabrique Foirade blinked. His eyelashes caught painfully in his hair. He shook the can. It made a heavy sloshing noise.
"This ain't empty," he said.
"I replaced it with pond water. Now, pass it on."
"Hey, who're you, giving me orders? I'm in charge."
"Okay," the other said reasonably. "Let the Army catch us."