They got the cash and they bought cocaine and whiskey, although the old-timers still liked the old government-issue whiskey better.
They continued to get chemicals in iron drums. One whiff of the sort of deadly gas that had been created could kill a man. A spoonful of the liquid allowed to mist in the air could wipe out a town. A quart would do a state, and the Pakeeta were sitting on four square miles of the drums and the original drums were rusting. Steel did that when buried in water-laden ground.
The steel had been doing that since Kaiser Bill and his Huns. The Department of the Army said it wasn't its problem; the Army had gotten rid of the gas. The Bureau of Indian Affairs wasn't responsible because that was a problem of the land itself and the BIA dealt only with the Indians; it had no jurisdiction under the ground. They kicked it over to the Department of the Interior, which launched an investigation and blamed the Army.
The drums rusted. Everyone knew they were dangerous. The government formed a high-level committee to investigate and make immediate recommendations. It was 1920 and there was enough gas underground at that time to wipe out Montana. By the time the committee was forming its final subcommittee to finalize its final recommendations, there was enough gas stored under the Pakeeta reservation to wipe out the United States and half the fish in the Atlantic, depending on how strong the winds were. It could also take out part of Canada and if there was a southward flow, settle Central America's problems for a good two centuries.
And then someone, as a little gift, sent a piece of one rusted drum to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and to the committee that was still investigating sixty-four years later.
In three mailrooms, every person was killed when the metal touched air coming out of its plastic package. In the fourth mailroom, a vent carried the scent to the second floor, where thirty-two people were left staring dumbly into space, their nervous systems wrecked forever.
The most frightening thing, however, was not the bodies but the note.
"Please check the metal. You will find that it was manufactured by the Rusco Steelworks of Gary, Indiana, in 1917, precisely for the Army. And that for one purpose: to store gas. We tried cleaning off the metal by immersion in chemicals but as you probably know by now, even the most severe chemical scrubbing cannot clean this stuff. We had to remove the metal to get the explosives into the drums. Quite a chore, considering everything had to be sealed airtight when we did it. But we're good at placing bombs. Ask the President."
Even before the bodies were cleaned out of the mailrooms, the second notes arrived, this time sent to the secretaries of the heads of the departments, which showed that the sender knew there would be no one left in the mailrooms to distribute the letters.
This letter was a puzzle. There was a maze that someone had to get through in order to get into the stored drums to dismantle the bomb before it exploded. There was also a schematic of the bomb and Army engineers expressed admiration for it. It could take off approximately fifteen acres of earth. Given proper jet-stream activity, it could blow enough poison gas into the air to destroy the Midwest.
Two men tried to follow the map that came with the note and were lost. So was a third. It seemed that not only did the Army Rangers have to tiptoe through cans of rusting nerve gas, loaded down with breathing apparatus and suits to keep their skin safe from air contact, but that there were people hiding in those underground areas who knew their way around and who knew how to kill.
And the bomb was going to go off.
Armies were useless. In the underground mazes of drums, ten thousand men were no better than one. In fact, the second note had warned that if more than two men were sent to disarm the bomb, it would be exploded.
One or two special men were needed and after the best of the Rangers were used up on the first day, the President had ordered the Army to step aside. He was going to use other means.
Remo arrived in Billings, Montana, on one of its rare muggy days with a little envelope containing the notes. It was the envelope Smith had given him back at Dulles Airport when the island-bound plane had been diverted back to takeoff. Find the bomb, disarm it and get it out from those rotting drums of poison gas.
"And, Remo," Smith had said, "watch yourself. All right?"
"You want me to do another steering wheel, Smitty?" asked Remo, and then he was off to Billings.
The Pakeeta reservation didn't have teepees but neat houses with pickup trucks, some laundry hanging on the lines of those houses without dryers, and large discount stores. No one was selling blankets and Remo didn't see a feather in anyone's hair. He was asked thirteen times what he was doing there and showed identification from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
He found the entrance to the gas-storage area, two plain steel doors set into a hill that looked like a bunker. Two guards at the entrance checked his papers.
"Some Army guys go in yesterday, they don't come out on their feet," said one of the guards.
"I'm not Army," Remo said.
"They plenty tough."
"It's not toughness that counts," Remo said with a little smile. "It's sweetness."
"Hey, where's your flashlight?"
"Don't need one."
"You want to leave your money with me?" the guard asked.
"Why?"
"You ain't coming out again and I can use it," the guard said.
"I'm coming out," Remo said.
Inside, he let the darkness fill him. The normal response of a person to dark was anxiety, which strained the nervous system. Fear made the dark darker. In dim light, Remo could adjust his eyes so that he could see normally. But in total darkness, he did a different kind of seeing. It wasn't normal vision with colors and outlines; it was more of a knowing.
The drums were stacked neatly, stretched out in square formations. Remo stayed still and heard a small scurrying sound, probably a hundred yards away. Good, he thought. No gas is escaping because the mice are alive. Of course, some of this gas manufactured in the fifties could attack through the skin. There was World War I and II gas, Korean gas, cold-war gas, Vietnam gas. Better dying through chemistry.
There was moisture here under the earth and there was a certain heaviness in the darkness. Remo tasted the air as he breathed. It was rich as it always was underground.
He moved between the drums according to the map and got lost. The map was useless. But the areas of drums did have borders and they were not that vast, so Remo began cutting the place up in squares, examining each square with eyes and hands, feeling for anything that might be a bomb, anything to indicate that he had reached that drum with sections sawn out, the sections that had killed the people in the government mailrooms.
It was slow. He stayed there two days. Four times the doors opened showing painfully white light, and voices called out asking Remo if he was all right.
"Yeah, I'm okay. Shut the door."
The Bureau of Indian Affairs said he didn't have to be there. "It's Army responsibility."
"Shut the door," Remo said. He had once been a soldier himself, long ago before his training, and he thought of the dependence on tools that most men had. Man first used a club, then a sharpened stone, and now he was using lasers from space. And every tool man used made him use his own abilities less, so that now most of his senses and muscles were as useless as his appendix. Using what you had: that was the secret of Sinanju.
He found where the Rangers had died. He could feel in the earth where heels had dug in, that desperate strong throb of muscles fighting for life, suddenly having to be used when they had never been used before.
And then suddenly the air was delicate again, not heavy. Another passageway had been opened. Remo was still. He heard them breathing; he heard their fingers work their way along barrels, fingers that were sure of where they were going.
They knew this place underground, for people did not move that quickly in the dark without having been there before. Then they stopped. They were waiting for him, waiting for him to make a sound.
In the dark, the Rangers had been at an awesome disadvantage against these men who knew their way. Remo heard them whisper.
"I don't hear him."
"Shhhhh."
"He still here?"
"Here? How's he gonna get out?"
"So why don't he make no sound?"
"Maybe he's sleeping."
And so, very clearly, Remo said: "Not sleeping, sweetheart. Come and get me."
He heard them move along the ground. They were quieter than most men. Indians probably. Indians could move well, even though most of them were too heavy. Remo moved himself with their rhythms so that they could not possibly hear him. He moved behind one and ever so gently pushed the third rib up into the aorta. Hearts did not pump efficiently with bone jamming into them. Remo put down the first one with smooth quiet in that dark chamber.