“Here, Doc!” The bodybuilder waved at a car emblazoned with signs for the walk and its sponsor. The words Safety Patrol were soaped onto the rear windows. The woman who rushed out was in a white sweatshirt with a large red cross, and she carried a bag of bandages, joint braces and water—most of the injuries on the walk were from stressed knees and dehydration.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“Right—” The bodybuilder looked all over the place. The general confusion spread through the crowd. A throng of women had witnessed the near-suicide and had gathered around the two men. So how had they slipped off unseen?
“We all saw them!” the bodybuilder protested, and many women raised their voices in agreement.
“Somebody get hurt?” asked a eager young woman in a windbreaker that was zippered to her throat.
“Don’t talk to her. She’s a reporter, and she’s bad news,” the doctor announced.
“Oh, no,” Remo groaned. They were watching from their car, parked up the street. The doctor’s warnings were unheeded and the eager women began telling the tale of their strange interlude with the two men who had been walking on the high building ledges.
“The emperor shall be most irritated with you, Remo.”
“Why with me? You were a part of this, and, incidentally, it was the right thing to do.”
But he knew Chiun was right. Smitty was going to be pissed, and that ticked him off big-time.
Chapter 37
“Jacob Fastbinder has come up with a name for the cave people—he is calling them Albinoid,” Smith said, ignoring the media circus brewing in Washington, D.C. over the disappearing human flies. “It’s a part of this propaganda package he is prepared to release to the world media.” Smith picked up a printed report that was so heavy it thumped when he dropped it again.
“He’s going to try to convince the world that his cave people are a genetically distinct race of human beings, which is actually a savvy move,” Mark Howard said. “Think about all the mileage he’ll get from that.”
“He’ll get sued is what he’ll get,” Remo said. “Isn’t an Albinoid a freakishly strong mint?”
“He’s angling for pseudo-scientific credibility,” Mark said. “He wants his cave people to have the same genetic distinction as the Caucasoid geographic race, the Negroid geographic race, the Australoids, the Mongoloids, the Indie and so on.”
“Please don’t explain what you’re talking about,” Remo said. “I’d rather listen to Smitty bitch than you lecture.”
“This is important,” Smith snapped. “It may seem obtuse, but it’s actually a stroke of deviant genius. If Fastbinder makes good on his threat and unleashes this on the world—” Smith tapped the press kit “—then the trouble really starts.”
Remo turned to Chiun, who didn’t meet his gaze. “You don’t understand this either, huh?”
“Here’s the two-minute version,” Mark Howard said. “For decades the scientific community divided the global races in a handful of major groups. You have the Caucasoid, or European geographic race, which we call Caucasian. You have the Indie or Hindu geographic race, which lumps together a lot of the people on and around the Indian subcontinent. Australoids are dark-skinned peoples indigenous to Australia. Negroid are dark-skinned peoples indigenous to Africa. These groupings are so generalized that the scientific community has moved away from them.”
“What of Koreans?” Chiun demanded. “If the Hindus rate a geographic race, then the Koreans deserve one, as well.”
“Part of the Mongoloid geographic race,” Mark said offhandedly.
“What?” Chiun squeaked. “I am no Mongol!”
“Not Mongol, Mongoloid,” Howard said. “It’s just a scientific classification—”
“Mongols are nursed by camels and keep fleas as pets.”
“It’s just another name for the Asian geographic race, Master Chiun,” Smith said reassuringly. “It’s simply the name of the race that encompasses all the Asian peoples.”
“All Asian peoples are not Korean and no Koreans are Mongols!”
“This is all beside the point.”
“What is the point of this insult, Emperor?” Chiun squeaked.
“No insult was intended, Master Chiun,” Howard, interjected, an air of desperation in his voice. “Remo?”
Remo was counting ceiling tiles. “Not my can of worms.”
“I refuse to be labeled a Mongol!” Chiun declared.
“We didn’t make up the label, Master Chiun,” Smith said reasonably. “As Mark said, the scientific community is abandoning these groupings. They are now considered misleading.”
“They certainly are!” Chiun squeaked.
“It’s Fastbinder who is resurrecting them,” Mark Howard added, following Smith’s thread and steering the conversation back on track. “He want to make use of these labels to stir up fears of racism If he calls his cave people Albinoid and puts them on par with the Negroid classification, he’ll gamer sympathy. Fighting the Albinoid people will seem racist. Invading the subsurface will be called colonialism.”
“Even if the subsurface is America’s subsurface?” Remo growled. “Even if the cave folks are nothing but inbred hillbillies who wandered into a cave during Civil War days and were too dumb to find their way out again?”
Mark shrugged.
“Can’t somebody do a test to prove they are inbred hillbillies, and not their own race?” Remo demanded irritably.
“Of course they can,” Smith said reasonably. “Their tests will include evidence that the Albinoids have no blood-grouping distinctions that signify racial uniqueness. What will it prove? Once Fastbinder riles the extremist antiracist, no scientific data will turn the tide.”
Remo glowered at the floor. “Yeah. If Jesse Jackson decides to throw his weight behind the Albinoid cause, no amount of facts or common sense is gonna shake him loose.”
Smith sighed. “What we need to keep in mind is that, if we reach the stage where Fastbinder goes public, it’s already too late. The U.S. would have an intransigent foe literally underfoot and no way of fighting him. It may be necessary to wipe out the subsurface dwellers before their existence becomes known.”
“You mean Fastbinder and his evil henchmen?” Remo demanded warily.
“I mean all of them. The entire subsurface population.”
“You’re talking genocide, Smitty.”
“A last resort, of course.”
‘It is not a resort at all. Forget about it.”
Smith looked squarely at the Reigning Master. “Remo, Albinoids have attacked and killed innocent human beings indiscriminately. I know it was Fastbinder who goaded them into it—”
“So we get Fastbinder.”
“Then what?”
Remo looked at Smith. “I finally get time off?”
“Then the cave people are unguided. They are without a controlling influence. They’ll be a continuing threat.”
“Maybe we’ll never hear from them again.”
“They have discovered treasures and endless food supplies aboveground,” Smith asked. “Quite frankly, the humans they’ve encountered haven’t put up much of a fight. What would keep them belowground when Fastbinder and his son are removed? Remember how difficult a time we had tracking al-Qaeda in the tunnels of Afghanistan? The Albinoids have a thousand times as much territory, maybe a hundred thousand. Tracking them will be impossible. No one who lives in the vicinity of their exits to the surface will be safe from their raids.” Smith allowed those words to settle. “We’ve made projections.”
Mark Howard brought out a printout of a United States map. He sketch a ragged border in pencil that included the entire southwestern states, up to the San Andreas fault, then east to the Mississippi River. “The subsurface system extends as far as this, roughly, from what we’ve ascertained from the raid patterns.”