But Cassandra's power was beyond them to resist. Death. A strange thing. And Remo decided he didn't like it. He wondered if that was the way all the people he had killed had felt. The next time he killed somebody, he would have to ask him what he was thinking about. That is, if there was a next time.
Brandt had thought he was smart, hiding the cannon. But Remo had thought the problem through, and the solution had come to him in a burst of inspiration. Why not hide the cannon out in the open? Where else but in the park? The park, with its collection of machine guns and artillery and the kids playing harmlessly around them. The park with its beautiful high-ground view of the church and the monument and the highway. All he had to do was go to the park and find a working .155 millimeter cannon.
That was all he had to do.
But it was too much. Remo went through the park carefully, checking each and every weapon. None of them was the potentially dangerous cannon. There were submachine guns that didn't fire. Bazookas that wouldn't fire. Mortars that couldn't fire. Cannons that had never fired. But there was no working cannon that could level the church, destroy the monument, and detonate the Cassandra.
Only twelve minutes left, and Remo was lost. He didn't even know where Brandt lived so he could get to his house in time to bleed the information on the cannon's location from him. He was without ideas and without prospects.
The village around him was slowly starting to come alive. People were moving quietly along the streets.
Remo watched them. America on its way to work. God-fearing, hard-working America.
He watched God-fearing, hard-working America idly for a moment from his perch on the park bench, Then he thought of something. Who went to work at five thirty A.M.? And these were all young men. Braves. And they all seemed to be going in the same direction.
It was no hope at all, but it was his only hope. Remo fell in with the small groups moving past the park, up toward the north. He walked fast, occasionally passing one of the groups but still able to follow the one just ahead.
Then he realized where they were going. The Big A supermarket!
Remo arrived there just a few minutes before six. Even though it was two hours before opening time, the interior of the store was already brightly lighted. Inside Remo could see Brandt. He was talking to a group of twenty young men, and more young men were arriving each minute, entering through the unlocked, pressure-operated front doors.
As the doors opened and closed, Remo could hear fragments of what Brandt was saying: "… supposed to be here… have to get rid of them ourselves… did you work out coordinates?"
The group which had now swelled to forty men, followed Brandt to one side of the store. As Remo watched, they fell onto the enormous display of toilet tissue, carrying the rolls away, first four-roll packages, then boxes, and then cartons, finally baring, under the protective mound of paper, the cannon. Remo understood why Brandt had gotten so upset when the women shoppers had hovered around the display. Sometime after the RIP had occupied the church, he had moved the cannon into the store from wherever its hiding place had been.
What a dumb place to store a cannon. So dumb, Remo almost hadn't found it.
Now all he had to do was stop it from being fired, hopefully without hurting anybody. The Apowa were, after all his kind of people, and Remo's sympathies lay with putting a shell into the church.
Brandt now was supervising as the Indians wheeled the cannon out of a small chicken-wire shed. The cannon was a big one. The top of its muzzle reached higher than a man's head.
Figuring that there had to be a side door to wheel it out through, Remo trotted around the low cinder-block building and found the wide delivery doors at the back. He found something else, too—the main power lines for the building. Remo looked for a fuse box on the outside wall but could not find one. The twin power lines came from utility poles to a spot about twelve feet up on the wall. They were connected there to heavy porcelain insulated mountings and then went through holes in the masonry wall into the building.
Remo leaped up and grabbed one of the insulators with his left hand. This would be tricky. He didn't understand electricity, so he took pains to figure it out carefully. If he just sliced one of the electric wires while he was touching the wall or the ground, he would be grounded and the jolt of electricity would pass through and probably kill him. Suppose he had worn his sneakers? Stupid, that wouldn't matter, he decided. But he wished he had them. Anyway, he had to cut the wire without being grounded.
Remo dropped back to the blacktop of the loading area. He stood under the twin wires, then crouched and leaped straight up.
At the top of his leap, he windmilled his right hand around his body and over his head. The hand hit the heavy insulated cable and sliced through it, separating the wire into two parts.
Remo, still off the ground, felt nothing but a faint tingle on the side of his hand. He landed lightly and danced out of the way of the severed section of cable, that writhed about the ground like an electric snake, sparking and spitting out its evil juice.
Remo poised himself, then leaped again and slammed his hand through the second wire. It too split and hit the ground with a splashing surge of electricity.
As soon as he landed, Remo was moving away from the spitting wires. He heard shouts from the supermarket.
"What the hell's going on?"
"Somebody go look at that fuse box."
He had to work fast now. He went back around the front of the store just as a faint hint of pink was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The automatic doors in front of the market no longer worked, and Remo had to force them open. Then he was inside, in the darkness, moving among the Indians, who had stopped wheeling the cannon and were waiting for the lights to come back on.
He moved in close and felt the cold polished steel of the barrel over his head. He tested the metal with his fingers and gave it exploratory taps with the sides of his hands. There were always weak spots in a machine, and a cannon was a machine. Chiun said there was always a spot where vibrations would bring it apart. He worked faster now, hitting the heels of his hands against the metal. And then he found it—a place that did not vibrate under his hands with the same dull hum as the other spots on the barrel.
Remo wrapped his hand around that spot on the barrel. Then from below, he began to swing his hands up and over his head, smashing hand against steel. It was rhythm—the pounding, left hand after right hand, left hand after right hand, in precise time, almost like a metronome. It filled the supermarket with dull bongs.
"Who's making that racket?" somebody nearby yelled.
"Cannon inspector," Remo answered.
Somebody else chuckled.
Then suddenly Remo, satisfied the metal now was vibrating in time with the thuds of his hands, changed the rhythm into a staccato series of smashes. The barrel of the cannon seemed to groan in pain. Remo stopped and slowly began to move toward the front door.
From the back of the store he heard a voice. Brandt's. "Damned wires come loose from the building somehow. I've some lights here. Everybody get one."
Men surged toward Brandt and took the battery-operated lights he held in his arms. Then they walked back toward the cannon, lights on and swinging in front of them, and illuminated the huge weapon.
"What the hell?" said someone.
"I'll be a son of a bitch," said Brandt.
The cannon stood there as it had before, but now its barrel, instead of pointing ceilingward in phallic pride, drooped impotently toward the floor of the store, like a shriveled stalk of celery.