«Good thinking, boy!» exclaimed Thunder Head. «Fine tactics. Tell ’em they’ll find me quicker if they separate. The one who reaches me can call the others; they’re not that far away from one another.»
«Considering the fact that you’re not anywhere near those woods, it’s not fine tactics,’ it’s dumb. They’ll get lost.»
«Hopefully, son, hopefully.»
«What?»
«In light of the nature of this engagement, the enemy’s using unorthodox strategy. Nothing wrong with unorthodoxy—hell, I’ve employed it most of my career—but it doesn’t make any sense if it retards your progress. In this situation, a frontal assault is our adversary’s most productive course—his only course, really—but instead he’s going around our flanks firing mortars filled with horseshit.»
«Lost me again, Chief,» said the caller.
«Anthropologists looking for the remnants of a great tribe?» scoffed Thunder Head. «A tribe from the Shenandoahs, savages brought over to the English court by Walter Raleigh, you believed all that crap?»
«Well, I suppose it’s possible. The Wopotamis came from someplace in the East.»
«From the Hudson Valley, not the Shenandoahs. For a fact, they were run off by the Mohawks ’cause they couldn’t farm and they couldn’t raise cattle and wouldn’t get out of their tepees if it snowed. They weren’t a great tribe, they were losers from day one until they reached the Missouri River, in the middle eighteen hundreds, where they found their true calling. They first hornswoggled, then corrupted the white settlers!»
«You know all that?»
«There’s very little about your tribe’s history I don’t know… No, son, someone’s behind this covert operation, and I’m going to find out who it is. Get to work now. Send ’em up to the woods!»
Twenty-three minutes passed, and one by one the members of Hyman Goldfarb’s scouting patrol entered the four paths in the dense forest. They had decided to separate insofar as the precise instructions they had received at the souvenir lean-to were totally imprecise and contradictory, the crowd of yelling squaws in a raucous debate over which path actually led to the great Thunder Head’s tepee, a residence obviously equated with some holy shrine.
Forty-six minutes later, one by one, each member had been ambushed and bound—arms and legs—to a sizable tree trunk, their mouths gagged with ersatz beaver pelts, all assured that rescue was imminent as long as they did not somehow find a way to remove the gags and scream. Should that happen, the wrath of a downtrodden, exploited people would descend on their heads, specifically their scalps, which would be no longer attached to their heads. And each, of course, was accorded treatment commensurate with his or her station and sex. The English lady was much tougher than her like-talking male associate, who attempted some complicated Oriental defense, only to wrench his left arm out of its elbow socket. The shorter, sniffing American tried to make a deal while slowly removing a short-barreled Charter Arms automatic from his belt and therefore had to be visited with several cracked ribs. The most strenuously difficult, however, Chief Thunder Head—né MacKenzie Lochinvar Hawkins (his middle name having been stricken from all records)—saved for the last. The Hawk always felt it was proper to permit his harshest challenge to have the honor of being the final barrier. You didn’t take out a Rommel with the first wave against the Afrika Korps—it just wasn’t, well, proper.
The challenge in question was outsized in bulk but not too sizable in the brain department. Following a damn good workout with a man no more than half his age, the Hawk prevailed by ducking twice in rapid succession and sending rigid, pointed fingers into the middle of the enemy scout’s stomach; he knew it would work by smelling the hostile’s breath. Up came an excess of Indian food from the scout’s throat; a hammerlock forcing the huge enemy head down toward his embarrassing accident did the rest.
«Your name, rank, and serial number, soldier!»
«Wadda ya talkin’?» belched the hostile, referred to as the ox by Thunder Head’s security.
«I’ll settle for your name and who you work for. Now!»
«I got no name and I don’t work for nobody.»
«Down you go.»
«Holy shit, have a heart!»
«Why? You tried to rip it out of my chest. Into the mess you go, soldier.»
«It smells so bad!»
«Not as bad as what I smell around all four of you clowns. Give me what I want, prisoner!»
«It’s wet … Okay, okay! They call me the Shovel.»
«I’ll accept a nom de guerre. Who’s your commander?»
«Wadda ya talkin’?»
«Who do you work for?»
«Wadda ya now, nuts?»
«All right, soldier, lose the rest of your stomach! You like our grub? Have it again, you old redskin lover!»
«Jeez, you got it yourself! I didn’t have to say nothin’. Redskins!»
«Come again, grunt?»
«He played for ’em! The Redskins … Lemme up, for Christ’s sake!»
«Played for …? I need more, you latrine-cleaner! What kind of hot air are you trying to peddle?»
«You’re closer, real close! They couldn’t put nuthin’ in the air while he was around. He didn’t need no defense hulks, he just broke right through and nailed the quarters from Namath on down! The Hebrew Hercules, maybe …?»
«Quarters—? Namath? Redskins?… Christ on a surfboard, football! And Hercules?… There was only one linebacker like that in NFL history. Hymie the Hurricane!»
«I didn’t say nuthin’! You said it.»
«You haven’t the vaguest idea what I said, soldier.» The Hawk spoke softly, rapidly, as he released the bull of a man while swiftly manipulating the ropes that secured him to the tree. «The Golden Goldfarb,» he continued hoarsely under his breath. «I recruited the son of a bitch when I was posted at the Pentagon!»
«You what?»
«You never heard that, Shovel—believe me, you never heard it!… I’ve got to get out of here, pronto. I’ll send someone back for you idiots, but you, you never told me anything, you understand?»
«I didn’t! But I’m also happy to oblige, Mr. Big Indian Chief.»
«That’s a small accomplishment, son, we’re on to bigger things. We just struck the gusher by rattling the biggest exposed nerve in Dizzy City!… The Golden Goldfarb, wadda ya know? Right now, I need a goddamned attorney-of-record fast, and I know exactly where that ungrateful asshole is!»
Vincent Mangecavallo, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, stared at the secure telephone in his outstretched hand as though the instrument were the inanimate embodiment, of a communicable disease. When the hysterical voice on the line paused for breath, the DCI yanked the phone to his ear and mouth and spoke quietly but grimly. «You listen to me, you pinstriped baked apple. I’m doing the best I can with talent your crowd only pays for but wouldn’t know how to talk to, much less let into your la-di-da country clubs. You wanna take over? Be my guest, and I’ll laugh like a goosed fruit when you get drowned in a vat of minestrone… You wanna know something else, you lockjawed cannoli?» Mangecavallo suddenly, briefly stopped, then resumed speaking in a much softer, friendlier voice. «Who’s kidding who? We all may be drowning in that barrel of soup. So far, all we got is zilch. That Court’s as clean as my mother’s thoughts—and no cracks from the Whiffenpoof group, thank you very much.»