"Destroyer 034 - Chained Reaction.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

The early reports were confusing. Either several men had been snatched or had joined a raid on a black section of Norfolk, Virginia. The full facts were not clear this morning because these were the first reports. Good intelligence, like good trees, took time to grow and each bit of information was the fertilizer that helped. So all Dr. Smith knew at 10:42 A.M. was that some men were missing. The computer said the men had certain commonalities, a phrase the brain used when it was looking for a reason for something.
Smith stared at the commonalities, his lemony grim face with the thin, tight lips unmoving, but the mind behind that forehead thinking, yet not panicking, realizing something was moving at the nation's innards, and there was still no idea as to why.
The commonalities of the missing men: they were all black, between twenty and twenty-three, and all had petty criminal records. All were unemployed and unemployable by federal standards.
Smith took a pencil from his gray vest. He liked tight vests and gray suits, white shirts, and his green striped Dartmouth tie. He always wore cordovans because they lasted longest in his opinion.
He started scribbling. The computers could do most things better than humans, except to really roll things around.
The terminal now reported that the number of missing men was a positive fourteen. Looking
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again at the list of common factors among the fourteen men, Smith realized that the people whose lives were affected most by the fourteen men were their relatives, and so he punched into his terminal a request for an early readout on the relatives.
Perhaps one of them had arranged the removal of these fourteen men. Even as he asked the question, Smith knew it was probably wrong. Those who had the most to gain by the disappearance of those missing from Norfolk would be the least likely and least capable of arranging those disappearances.
Only one relative's name came onto the computer, not because it was likely to have arranged the disappearance of the fourteen, but because of a contact with CURE at a previous point. The name was Gonzalez, R., but it was quickly preempted by more important information from the computer: Several witnesses saw subjects being grappled with, bound, and injected with some sort of tranquilizing subject. Those doing it wore Navy shore-patrol uniforms.
Smith asked the computer for a whereabouts on Remo and Chiun. This was done by simply doing what a computer did best, looking through piles of information for something significant. The computer scanned its records, looking for reports of people doing what most people couldn't do. If there were reports from police or newspapers of a single man with bare hands effortlessly crippling many men with guns, that would be an indication. If there was a tale of somebody walking up the side of a building, that would be another. If there was a report of a white and an
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Oriental involved in a disturbance, caused when someone accidentally touched the Oriental and was dismembered for it, that would have been a conclusive.
This time, the computer gave Dr. Smith only one report. A man had jumped from an airplane without a parachute and lived.
Smith's eyes widened in anticipation and then became their normal steel gray again. The man had indeed jumped from an airplane and lived. He had been injured and was now at Winstead Memorial Hospital, outside of Ramage, South Dakota. His condition was critical.
So much for the whereabouts of Remo and Chiun. They were not at Ramage, South Dakota. It would have taken more than an airplane jump to put Remo in the hospital.
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CHAPTER FOUR
The Master of Sinanju had heard it and did not believe it. He would have asked again if he thought he could bear the answer. He asked again.
"What have I done to you that you would commit so foul a deed on me ?"
"Maybe it's not foul, Little Father," said Remo.
"I cannot believe it," said Chiun.
"Believe it," Remo said. "I will not kill again."
"Eeeeeeah," said Chiun and Remo's words withered his tired old ears. "The pain I can bear. But knowing that I have betrayed my ancestors by giving so much that will not come back to the House of Sinanju, this I cannot live with."
"I'm not going to feel guilty," Remo said. "I have my life to live, too, and I wasn't born an assassin."
"That need not be mentioned now," said Chiun. And then, in the darkness of his morning, a shaft of light appeared. "You have killed, Remo. By your act, you kill. You kill the House of Sinanju by what you do. Who will pass on what we know? Who will take the sun source of the martial arts and give its essence to another to keep it alive? Who, then, if not you ?"
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"You," said Remo. "You found me. Find someone else."
"There is no one else."
"What about all those wonderful Koreans you always claim could master Sinanju, but in a moment of weakness you chose a white instead of a Korean ? Get one of them."
"I am too old now."
"You're not more than eighty-five."
"I have given so much, there's nothing left."
Remo watched the steaming pot on the boat's butane cooking stove. He was leaving for his new job after this lunch. The rice was steamed perfectly and the duck was a few moments from completion.
He had reservations for a Delta flight out of West Palm Beach to New York City. What he did not mention was that he had reservations for two.
"Do you want ginseng on your rice or not?"
"Ginseng is for happy times. Ginseng is for hearts that have not been broken or betrayed," said Chiun.
"No ginseng?"
"A little," said Chiun. "To remind me of happy days which will be no more." He made sure with his eyes that he got the proper amount. Remo crumbled the root into the boiling pot.
He saw Chiun's face raise a bit, concentrating on the ginseng. He added another pinch. The face lowered.
"But I will not enjoy it," he added. During the meal, Chiun added how he was not enjoying anything. Yet he knew there were worse things in the world, he said. Much worse.
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"Yeah, what?" asked Remo, chewing his rice to liquidity. Eating, properly pursued, was no more enjoyable at this stage of his development than a breathing exercise. It was, properly done, the tak-ing-in of nourishment. To enjoy it was to do it wrong. For that could lead to eating things for enjoyment instead of nourishment, and that could be fatal, especially to Americans who ate like that all the time.
"You think more of your rice than what I think is a desecration," said Chiun.
"That's right," said Remo.
"Perfidy," Chiun said. "Eternal perfidy. I have one wish in life. And that is never for my eyes to settle upon the waste of Sinanju doing what it was not trained for."
"Okay," said Remo.
"I do not even want to know what you will do."
"Good," said Remo. "It will be better for you that way."
"You know," Chiun said, "not everyone appreciates assassins, no matter how great they are."