a candle, then removed his hat, coat, and wool scarf. Beneath them he was wearing the three-piece gray suit he had worn every day since Remo had first met him. Sitting at the candlelit kitchen table in the cabin, Smith looked exactly as if he were at his desk in Folcroft Sanitarium.
"A number of men are disappearing from military bases in different parts of the country," he said. Remo hopped up and sat on the unused wood-burning stove. "C'mon," he said. "They've been doing that since Vietnam. It's called desertion. Or it used to be. Now with this brand-new wacko volunteer army, it's probably one of the new career specialties. Join the army and run away." Chiun slapped his .arm. It stung. "Silence. Do not speak to our emperor thus," he hissed. "Oh, mighty Emperor Smith, do not punish the young fool too harshly, for he is yet, despite all my effort, a brainless thing. A simple thrashing with wet whips would suffice." He whispered in Korean to Remo, "You deserve to be beheaded, idiot. Let the lunatic emperor talk."
"Nobody gets beheaded in America," Remo said. "It's a good thought, though. Maybe that'd stop the army desertions. We could make a deal with Sweden and Canada. Give them a few bucks for every deserter's head they send back." He shook his head. "They probably wouldn't do it, though. Too bad. The French'd do it. The French'd do anything for a buck. Except work."
"We have reason to believe they're not deserting," Smith said. "In the first place, the missing soldiers aren't recruits. They're chaplains. And nobody knows how they're disappearing or why. According to the president's reports from the Pentagon, none
23
of them took anything with them—no money, no snapshots from home, nothing to indicate that they left voluntarily."
From his vest pocket he extracted a neatly folded map of army bases around the country. Some of the bases were circled, with arrows leading from one to the next. "Fort Antwerth in central Iowa was the first camp to be affected. Then Fort Beson in southern Kansas, followed by Fort Tannehill in New Mexico." He traced the route of the disappearances with his finger. "Whatever's happening, it's moving southward. The next attack, if there is one, should either be at Fort Wheeler in Oklahoma or Fort Bor-goyne here in Texas, about a hundred miles due south. You're midway between the two points now. The plane that brought me in has orders to wait for you. You can get to either base in less than an hour."
Remo studied the map. "It could be a nut job," he said.
Smith looked at him drily, awaiting further explanation.
"Some psycho murderer on the outside who doesn't like army preachers," Remo said. "A sniper or something. Can't the army's M.P.'s look into it?"
Smith shook his head. "The reports at all three of the camps where the chaplains disappeared have been negative. Not a trace."
He was silent for a moment, as if deliberating whether or not to tell Remo the rest. After a moment he said, "There's more." He took a miniature tape recorder from his coat pocket.
"Strange things have begun to happen at these camps immediately following the disappearance of their chaplains," Smith said. "The commanders' re-
. 24
ports are virtually identical. First, the chaplains disappear. Then there's mass confusion among the enlisted men. For a day or so, the reports are frantic. The officers can't get the recruits to listen to them. Discipline is at zero. Offenders are placed under military arrest, but apparently just about every enlisted man on the base is an offender, and the guardhouses can't hold them all."
"So what do the C.O.'s do then?"
"Nothing. There's nothing they can do but wait for it to pass. At all three camps, the confusion disappeared totally within two or three days. That's been the pattern."
Smith fidgeted in his chair, uncomfortable with what he was saying. "Here's where the reports become really odd," he said quietly, his eyebrows raised. "If this weren't thoroughly documented from three unrelated bases, I'd have difficulty believing it," he waffled.
"Smitty, you have difficulty believing in gravity," Remo said. "Just tell me, and we'll work out the plausibility studies later."
Smith looked at Remo acidly. He took a deep breath. 'To a man, the commanders swear that a sweeping change comes over the recruits after the two-or three-day period of chaos. Discipline shoots to an incredible high. Every order is obeyed without question, even the slightest suggestions.
"At Fort Beson, a drill instructor told one of the recruits to go fly a kite. The private wandered off and came back tö the identical spot an hour later with a box kite made of newspaper and plywood. He started flying the thing in the middle of dress parade, and wouldn't stop without a direct order."
"That's doing it the army way," Remo said.
25
Smith's expression was without a trace of humor. "See if this strikes you as amusing," he said, pressing down the "play" button on the recorder.
As the tape began to wind, a man's voice rang tinnily out of the recorder. The man was obviously frightened out of his wits. His voice quavered as he tried to keep it under control. The man was talking wildly about zombies and a foreign plot to take over the U.S. Army, but the focus of the speech was the murder of the man's top aide, a Lieutenant Andrew Fitzroy King. The man on the tape insisted over and over that his aide had been stabbed to death in front of him while he was submitting a report about the weird goings-on at the base.
Smith shut off the recorder. "That was the base commander at Fort Tannehill," he said. "A two-star general. He sent this recording to the president by special courier. The president gave it to me this morning."
"I suppose Lieutenant King disappeared without a trace, too."
Smith closed his eyes and opened them again slowly. "There is no military record of Lieutenant Andrew Fitzroy King on file at the Pentagon," he said. "According to the army, he not only disappeared, he never existed. Of course, I have a few such Kings on file at Folcroft, but I can't determine which one he is, since no one on the base will acknowledge his existence."
"Where's the general now?"
Smith exhaled slowly. "About a half-hour after he sent this tape, he was discovered in a bathtub full of warm water, with his wrists slashed. The report was filed listing it as suicide."
Remo rewound the tape and played it again, lis-
26
tening to the fear in the general's words as they told the bizarre story. He stared thoughtfully at the machine as the general's speech ended and was replaced by a long hiss. After a moment, the recorder clicked off.
"He could have been mentally unbalanced," Remo offered lamely, haunted by tíie voice on the tape. He wanted to shake the feeling of desperation the general's words had communicated. "Maybe this Lieutenant King person never did exist, as they said."
"I hope you're right," Smith said. "Because if the general was telling the truth, it means that someone's been tampering with the Pentagon files. Only a handful of the most powerful people in the country have private access to those files." The worry ünes in Smith's face deepened. He looked very tired.
"Look, Smitty. How sane could the general have been, with that crazy talk about zombies? This guy's suicide probably has nothing to do with the missing chaplains."
"Unfortunately, that's the one word that appears consistently in each of the reports from the bases," Smith said. "Zombies."
He got to his feet and struggled back into his heavy clothes. "Wait here until you hear from me," he said. "This line is secure."
Smith opened the squeaky kitchen door. "By the way, Remo, I expect you to return that car you took from the airport. Automobile theft is a serious offense." He left. In a few moments, the roar of the pickup truck's engine punctuated the still night.
"I'm surprised he didn't make a citizen's arrest," Remo said.
"He should have," Chiun said, rolling out the thin