"Something special is hidden in that hill. There has been nothing else defended like it in the entire country," said Rabinowitz. He could not worry about being left alone. He was in a war. But why was he in this war?
He didn't have time to answer that. He had a military problem. Something was up there that could possibly be incredibly dangerous. How would they attack it without suffering enormous losses, losses so staggering they could make the whole campaign a failure?
He could address the attacking troops, work on their minds, making them believe they could not be hit by bullets. The few survivors might take the hill. So he could get them to do it if he wanted. That was not the problem.
He turned to his officers. Every suggestion that came back had to do with waiting for long-range bombers that would take at least a day to employ if Smith could get them employed. He had been having trouble with the air force because they had special command frequencies not available to the rest of the military. This was to prevent an accidental nuclear war, he said.
He turned to Smith.
"I know of only two men who could get through that crossfire alive. And one of them is working for us now," said Smith.
"One man. There's a division in those bunkers. I know it. One man can't do it all. I don't care how wonderful he is," said Rabinowitz.
"For every weakness, O Great Wang, there is a strength. For every strength there is a weakness," said the peculiar Oriental with the incredibly fast hands.
The firing continued from the hill at an ear-numbing rate.
And then Rabinowitz understood what the weakness had to be.
"The ammunition. Of course. It's the ammunition. If they can fire like that, they must have an incredible storage facility for ammunition. We get one in there with a delayed explosive timer, and set off the whole thing. Attack just at the moment of explosion. The timing has to be great, but it can work."
"Who can get through that field of fire alone?" asked a colonel.
And then Chiun got a strange order from the Great Wang.
"Look, schlep yourself over to those bunkers in the hills, and lay this delayed explosive. Use your tricks and stuff. Don't worry about me. I'll be safe."
"I would never worry about you, Great Wang. You are Sinanju. To worry about you would be to insult you. But to sneak explosives into place is not the work of Sinanju. Who do we wish to kill? What great man is there?"
"What who? Just do it. C'mon. The whole attack is delayed. Something's in there and we have to get it," said Rabinowitz.
"An explosive. An explosive will kill just anyone. A soldier would use an explosive. He would use it like a gun. He doesn't care who he kills. He does not have the aesthetic sense of an assassin. Would you ask me to be a common soldier, Great Wang?"
"Not only am I asking, but I'll tell you something else. You'll love it. It is a new taste sensation to blow up people instead of taking off their heads with your bare hands. God forbid you should offend your aesthetics. Okay? Do it."
And so Chiun, who had never defiled the teachings of Sinanju, was shown explosives to kill whoever happened to be near them when they went off. And sadder still was the fact that he believed now that he was enjoying this.
He did not need darkness to move unseen upon those in the fortified hills. He needed only their fear and the tiredness of their eyes, and the deflection of the heat rays. For in the midday, the human eye contracted and in so doing lost an almost imperceptible portion of its field of vision. And in these portions did Chiun move that day with the explosives in his hands.
"I can't believe they're not firing at him," said one colonel.
"They can't see him," said Harold W. Smith, peering at the open field with binoculars. He was getting computer terminals rigged for the front because that was where Rabinowitz usually was, Miss Ashford's best friend and the salvation of America.
"He's visible to us," said the colonel.
"Right, because we're looking at him from this angle. But in the hills they have the wrong angle."
"Man would make a tremendous ranger," said the colonel.
"He'd never do that sort of work," said Smith.
"Well, what does he call that?"
"A new taste sensation, I think. Don't know," said Smith. "Got to get back to the terminals. Your people could use more reserve ammunition down here."
Like even the ancient forts, there was an entrance to the fortress, and this entrance was the most heavily defended.
And just like Sinanju had always gotten into ancient forts Chiun avoided the door but worked his way into the earth. Dissolving the fresh concrete and iron-rod reinforcements with one hand, he carried the explosive device in the other hand. Entering the tunnel, he saw a surprised Russian soldier, and even though he was no one important, Chiun sent him instantly to the fastest possible death.
First the soldier had seen the wall of the bunker dissolve. Then an Oriental in a black kimono came through it. Then the soldier was out of pain forever.
In classical Russian, Chiun asked the whereabouts of the ammunition stores, and at first those he met did not wish to reveal this information, especially to a non-Russian with a time bomb. But after just a moment's reasoning, when the pain became tolerable, they were able to express themselves better.
Chiun set the timer, placed the device well into a rack of artillery shells, worked his way through the first outside wall he came to, and left the hills safely because at this angle some of the defenders could see him.
Why, he wondered, did the Great Wang want him to do a soldierly duty, and why, more important, didn't he mind more? These were serious questions, and even the massive explosion of the hill behind him did not distract him from them. Was something wrong? Why had he enjoyed that dastardly deed, of killing people he did not even know or respect? And what about Mad Smith? Why did he think he was now wise? The man was white from the day he was born.
Chiun did not care about the excitement of the attack. Amateurs attacking amateurs. Not a decent, clean stroke among them. American troops poured into the Russian defenses, and a lead column stopped and called for the general himself. Rabinowitz.
They had found what the Russians had defended so thoroughly. They had found why the Russians had not let the Sornicans man these positions.
In deep, reinforced silos, so well secured even the explosions did not damage them, were intermediate-range nuclear missiles, so deadly accurate they could zero in on the desk in the Oval Office at the White House.
Russia had violated the latest arms treaty by sneaking missiles right into these Sornican hills. They could have launched a first strike from a direction in which America had not prepared to defend.
The news was wired to Washington immediately, and just as immediately, the great debate on the wrongness of invading Sornica now disappeared. It was apparent these three columns had saved the nation.
And the missiles were there, right in the ground where even a television reporter couldn't miss them. Only the columnists held out.
"Doesn't matter," said one woman who had managed to blame Arab terrorism on the President. "Do what we did in Kampuchea where the Khmer Rouge were forcing children to murder other children. If you think this is bad, Cambodia was worse. It was like the Nazi holocaust. Millions rounded up, worked to death, slaughtered. Entire cities emptied of people."
"I remember, I welcomed the Khmer Rouge," said the columnist for the New York newspaper.
"Blame the Americans," said the columnist for the Washington newspaper.
"How can we do that? These are Russian missiles aimed at our population centers."
"When the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge came out, I blamed America because America had been bombing Cambodia. Therefore, American bombs made those people mad."
"But lots of people have been bombed without ending up slaughtering each other. Look at the British in World War II. They were bombed much worse than the Cambodians. It didn't make them savage animals."
"Don't bring in facts. Just say it. We'll be fine. When I'm really cooking I say I'm facing harsh truths. Goes over beautifully in Boston with all those colleges there. The harsher the truth, the better."
"So the harsh truth is, we're responsible for these missiles, and they are there because we are invading."
"That's facing the truth," said the Washington columnist who had faced the harshest of truths in Iran before the Ayatollah Khomeini, Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge. and Vietnam before people were willing to risk their lives by the thousands in flimsy boats to escape their liberation. In Washington, two things became blatantly apparent. One, America had been fortunate to detect the missiles, and two, no one could quite figure out the command structure that had ordered it, other than that it had something to do with that strange situation in Fort Pickens, Arkansas.