Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue Read online

  CHAPTER 4

  SOME OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME

  Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense, In peace a charge, in war a weak defense.

  —John Dryden, “Lines on a Paid Militia” from Cymon and Iphigenia

  Shelby Kent and many others had wondered at the simultaneous appearance in the news of two batches of defective, obsolete weapons. She, and many others, had speculated vaguely over a possible connection between the worthless rifles in Honduras and the dud grenades in the River Styx. They all thought about it awhile, and then they forgot it.

  Sir John Dudley didn’t forget. It was Sir John’s job not to overlook or ignore or forget anything that involved the United Nations Militia. It was his office’s intelligence reports that had warned the commanding officer in Tegucigalpa that trouble was brewing in San Pedro. And it was his responsibility to sniff out the next place and time terrorists would get hold of illegal weapons. For it was going to happen again, he was sure of it. All the signs said so.

  The distinctions between war and peace had been growing increasingly vague over the years—battle took place under an ever-expanding variety of labels ranging from “police action” to “defensive strike.” The Asian wars of the fifties and sixties had demonstrated dramatically that hand-to-hand combat still had advantages over nuclear warfare—the old chestnut about not firing off a cannon to kill a gnat. Korea, for example, had been an infantry war.

  Thus the infantryman made a return to one of his traditional roles. Throughout history the foot soldier had been called upon to back up civil authority; this civil-military alliance came to be taken for granted in the second half of the twentieth century as one deadly encounter after another was fought at street level. Belfast became the world’s symbol for the horrors of blood in the streets, and the warrior-policeman was more and more in demand because of his training in riot control. The UN Militiaman, wearing his lightweight plastic armor and carrying his modern weapons, was a figure to be feared and respected.

  When the nations of the world had finally agreed that a full-time, sophisticated, international peacekeeping force was essential to global stability, Sir John Dudley had been plucked from retirement to head up the Militia’s intelligence operation. He was the logical choice for the job. Sir John had been a very young man when the Nazi fungus had begun spreading over Europe. He’d spent the war at Bletchley, part of the British government’s oddball collection of code-crackers and decipherers. Eventually the mathematicians and the linguists and the classical dons and the solvers of crossword puzzles who made up the Government Code and Cipher School had drifted back to their normal lives. But young John Dudley, intrigued by the whole spy-catching business, had stayed on in MI-6, to the Foreign Office’s undisguised delight. He’d risen to become Chief of Secret Intelligence Service, accumulating along the way the expertise that had caused the UN to summon him from a predictably dull retirement. A worldwide intelligence system—with muscle to back it up. How could he resist?

  Interpol had never had any real clout because of its dependence upon the voluntary co-operation of local law enforcement officers. But an intelligence operation tied to an international militia would be both co-ordinated and on safe legal ground everywhere in the world. A committee of UN delegates had labored for three years to draw up the plans for a military organization that would not be tied up in red tape when crossing international boundaries but which would still respect the rights of individual nations.

  Not an easy task. And not one all the peoples of the world were in sympathy with. A global army? they asked. What a weapon for totalitarian oppression. Not at all, said others. The UN system of checks and balances was such as to make hegemony impossible—no one group of people could ever effectively gain dominance over another group of people. But things never were really that simple, so people still worried. And large numbers simply weren’t sure how they felt about it at all.

  For that reason Sir John Dudley and his intelligence operatives had to tread carefully. The first act of rebellion, in Burma, had been treated as a purely local matter, puzzling but not particularly significant. There had been very little news coverage of the event—reporters weren’t noticeably eager to parachute into the Burmese jungles and had contented themselves with official handouts. The second incident, in Honduras, had been much more visible. And then there was that curious business of the grenades in the Styx River. (The Styx! What on earth had possessed the Americans to name it that?)

  What the general public didn’t know was that the insurrectionists in Burma had also been armed with defective weapons.

  Sir John stared out the window of his office, seeing nothing of New York’s busyness below him. Burma, Honduras, Alabama—where was the pattern? Not even a geographic balance: once in Asia, twice in the Americas. Where next—Africa, Europe? The North Pole? He snorted. A rebellion of Eskimos? Not bloody likely.

  Two questions needed answering. One, what did the insurrectionists think they were going to accomplish? Two, why were acts of rebellion undertaken with weapons that virtually guaranteed failure? Sir John suspected the first question was not particularly important—sometimes any excuse for a fight would do. Survivors of the Burmese fiasco had all been members of a splinter sect of one of those esoteric Eastern religions that were a constant source of unrest. The conflict was an old one: You go to my church and I’ll go to mine—or else I’ll kill you. For some reason the insurrectionists had thought attacking a UN garrison on the Irrawaddy was a good way to force their own religious views on the rest of the country. Sir John had not yet received a final report on what the Honduran rebels thought they were fighting for.

  Of much more interest was the question of the weapons. The World War II .30 caliber carbines the Hondurans had been carrying—some of them still bore traces of their original packing grease. Incredible. Where had they been all these years? And even if the carbines had not been defective, did the Hondurans really believe they would be effective against the more sophisticated weaponry used by the UN Militia? At short range the carbine was deadly, but shoot at a distant target and it became totally unreliable. The carbine fired a bullet with only a third of the energy and two-thirds the velocity of most standard service rifles. Many of the American states had banned the carbine’s use in hunting because it wounded more game than it killed. The .30 caliber carbine was little more than a high-powered pistol. The only explanation for its appearance in the hands of the Honduran insurgents was that they didn’t know the difference.

  Two shipments of military hardware that wouldn’t work might be dismissed as coincidence, but the bad grenades that had showed up in Alabama—well, that changed the picture considerably. Coincidence was out. The only difference was that the Americans had detected the flaws in their weapons whereas the Burmese and the Hondurans had not. But then, Americans always had been handy with instruments of destruction. Southern Alabama was now witnessing an influx of UN Militia and intelligence agents large enough to discourage even the most dedicated of rebels. Alabama wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was who was supplying these useless weapons, and why? Did there exist somewhere some benevolent masked marvel who saw himself as a defender of the world’s attempt to protect itself against itself? Was there someone who’d learned in advance of the insurgents’ intentions and then took steps to make sure they failed? One could indeed argue that whoever had supplied those weapons had helped the UN’s peacekeeping efforts in the world. Petty rebellions sometimes had a nasty way of growing into major revolutions.

  The intercom on his desk buzzed. “Mr. Gilbert to see you, Sir John.”

  “Send him in.”

  Kevin Gilbert’s normally tanned face had a gray look to it, which Sir John knew meant he hadn’t had much sleep. Gilbert was one of those Americans who took a workaday approach to every problem they encountered, no matter how outré. It was Gilbert Sir John had sent to Honduras to find out what was going on.

  “Well?” asked Sir John. “Wha
t’s the final count?”

  “As of last night, six hundred thirteen Hondurans dead, two Militia.”

  “That’s two too many.”

  “Most of the Hondurans were killed in the first rocket attack,” Gilbert said. “The CO stopped the second launching when he saw the insurgents weren’t doing much in the way of hitting back. So he just sent in mop-up squads, and that was the end of it. A lot of yelling and cursing, but the Hondurans couldn’t really do anything when most of their weapons wouldn’t fire.”

  Sir John nodded. “I want to know why over six hundred people just died.”

  “Political reasons this time, not religious ones. Free the people. Kill the UN slave-masters. Kill the dictator. Kill the tax assessor. Kill the postman.”

  “Have a pew.”

  Gilbert sat down and made his report. Extensive interrogation of the survivors had revealed a lot of slogans but very little in the way of hard facts. “One of them kept yelling, ‘Death to the tyrants! Death to the tyrants!’ When we asked him which tyrants, he couldn’t name a single name.”

  “Your conclusion?”

  “These rebels are the kind who’ll hit out at any established power. They were planning an attack on the UN forces in Tegucigalpa when we learned of the arms shipments to San Pedro and stole a march on them. The fact that it happened to be the UN Militia they were after is almost incidental. Any bastion of authority would have done.”

  Sir John himself had been thinking earlier that sometimes any excuse for a fight would do. Gilbert was probably right: any target would do, as well. “What about the supplier?”

  Gilbert shook his head. “Nothing. The only two of the leaders who weren’t killed said they’d dealt with a man named Pedro, no last name.”

  “Pedro as in San Pedro?”

  “Yes, sir. False name, obviously, as well as incomplete. We’re trying to trace him—but it’s the needle in the haystack. How many Pedros are there in Central America?”

  Sir John nodded, his attention already elsewhere; he’d expected nothing else. He walked over and stood in front of the map of the world that covered the wall opposite his desk. “You think it will happen again?” he said to Gilbert.

  “I’d bet on it,” Gilbert answered. “And I’d give next month’s salary to know why.”

  Sir John stared at the map. “Where?”

  “Africa,” Gilbert said without hesitation.

  “Why Africa?”

  “Because the one time faulty weapons were supplied to a non-Third-World group, it didn’t work. Next time our supplier will stick to people with little experience with modern weaponry. Or near-modern. That means a nonindustrialized people. Hill people in Afghanistan. Nomadic herdsmen almost anywhere. But African tribes are more populous and more easily accessible than wandering goatherds. I say Africa.”

  “You may be right,” Sir John said darkly.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’VE GOT A LITTLE LISZT

  “He does it on purpose,” Shelby Kent complained to her sister. “He deliberately tells me a lie, and then watches to see what I’ll do.”

  “What do you do?” Tee asked.

  “Pretend not to notice. Have to, now—only way to avoid a fight. Oh, I took the bait when he first started doing it. And we had quite a few knock-down-drag-outs, I can tell you. Eric wants to fight with me, Tee. So he keeps setting these little traps.”

  “Which you keep sidestepping. How long can you keep that up?”

  “Not much longer,” Shelby sighed. “Confrontation Time looms. You know he wants me to give up the police work.”

  “You’re not going to, are you?”

  “I thought about it. For a full five minutes, I thought about it. But hell, Tee, I’m the only person in the world who can read that particular aura people give off when they’re lying. I should give up my one claim to uniqueness just because Eric Kent can’t handle it? It’s a valuable gift—I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t work for it. I was born with it. But I’m not going to let Eric bully me into giving it up.”

  “Ah, come on, Shel,” Tee said unhappily. “You’re both reasonable people. You’ll work it out.”

  Shelby looked at her sister’s face and felt a stab of remorse. She had no business dumping her marital problem on Tee; Tee herself had retreated into marriage as a refuge against the mean hard cold ugly competitive world that intimidated her utterly.

  “What’s on this afternoon?” Shelby asked, changing the subject.

  Tee made a face. “Giselle. Tinkle, tinkle, plonk, plonk. Sometimes I think I’ll go mad if I have to play that insipid stuff one more time.”

  Every day at noon Tee got into a cab and rode forty-one blocks downtown to the dingy loft the Metropolitan Ballet Company used as a rehearsal hall. There she sat at an upright piano for four hours, pounding out tunes that bored her stiff while the dancers bent and stretched and leaped and sometimes fell down. Then into another cab (Tee claimed that every bus she’d ever boarded had had at least six crazy people on it) and back home again to wait for her husband. Mornings were good; Tee could play her real music, practice scales, teach herself, improve and grow—a concert pianist who didn’t give concerts. Tee was afraid. Of almost everything. Her piano, her husband, and her sister were the three points of the triangle that enclosed her life.

  Hiding her light under a bushel, Shelby thought. Exactly what Eric wants me to do.

  “What about you?” Tee asked. “Any more police jobs lined up?”

  “I never know until the last minute. I just get a call and somebody says they’ve got a suspect and could I come listen. That’s why I have so few jobs on the west coast—they can hold a suspect only so long without charging him, and sometimes I just can’t get there fast enough.”

  “Oh sure—I never thought of that. They wouldn’t know ahead of time who’s going to be a suspect, would they? I didn’t realize you have to be ready to pick up and go at any time.”

  “It’s not too bad. I keep a bag packed, just in case I have to stay overnight.”

  All the time they were talking Tee kept squeezing a pair of hand grips, contraptions made of tough plastic handles and stiff metal coils. Tee had begun hand-strengthening exercises almost from the day she’d discovered what a piano was—with the result that the unathletic Tee now had the strongest hands of anyone Shelby knew. Whenever there was a jar with a tight lid that needed opening, it was Tee who did the opening.

  “My agent got a call yesterday,” Tee said offhandedly, squeezing away.

  “Oh?” Shelby perked up.

  “New Orleans Symphony. Wanted to know if I was still available.”

  “Tee …”

  “I said maybe next year.”

  “Oh, Tee!”

  “Can’t do it, Shelby. I’m just not ready.”

  “The hell you aren’t! You—”

  “I can’t. I just can’t. But it’s nice to know you’re remembered. Maybe next year.”

  “Tee.” Shelby used her stern-older-sister voice. “You’ve been saying that for over two years now. It’s time you came out of hiding. Professionally, you’re ready. You’ve got to stop making excuses. You’ve got to stop being scared.”

  “Next year,” said Tee. “I promise.”

  Shelby’s phone rang. “Yes … yes, Sergeant. Twenty-fifth Precinct. Yes, I remember where the station is—on 119th, right? Be there in half an hour.” She replaced the receiver. “Got to run. They’ve picked up some guy in East Harlem guarding an arsenal big enough to equip a small army.”

  CHAPTER 6

  HOLD THAT LINE

  Two Men of Steel Comment on Their Profession

  Everything that happens in the game happens for the best. Regardless of all the things that are said and written during the season, I’m almost always able to walk tall. I’ve got the most powerful force a man can have on his side—God.

  —Mel Blount

  Pro football is the enema of society. There’s an element of society that uses football as a release. Ther
e’s one Steelers fan who sits behind the bench at home games and berates Dwight White for four quarters. I figure it must be some kind of therapy for that fan to scream at White.

  —Randy Grossman

  Eric Kent stared at the list he had just made out and swept it aside in disgust. Free Jersey Day. Free Helmet Day. Free Kick-in-the-Ass Day.

  You couldn’t bribe people into supporting a losing team. That’s what baseball tried to do—but baseball had a 162-game schedule and interest was bound to flag now and then. Football was different.

  The Jets had gone seven and nine this last season. The worse they played, the more the fans stayed away. The more the fans stayed away, the more the owners screamed at Eric to do something. What could he do? Nobody went to a football game with an objective eye, interested only in game-playing strategy. They went to take sides, to align themselves with one team against another. To fight in a surrogate war without getting hurt. So who wanted to side with losers? How could Eric pump up any enthusiasm for a team that completed only one pass out of every four, fumbled every third time they ran the ball, and missed twenty-five-yard field goals?

  Laughter in the hallway interrupted his train of thought. Eric got up and opened his door, welcoming the distraction. Three men were walking toward him, a stranger flanked by two members of the Jets organization.

  “Hey, Kent, we were coming to see you,” said Warren Hubbs, one of the assistant assistant coaches. “This is Bill Malone, new sports writer at the Daily News.” Eric eyed Malone carefully as they shook hands. Parrot or adversary? Most of them were one or the other, though they all thought they were somewhere in between.

  “Hubbs tells me you’re the man to answer my questions,” Malone said.

  “Do my best.” Eric smiled. “Have a seat.”

  Hubbs and the other Jets man, Buck Walters, took the two comfortable seats in Eric’s office and left the aluminum-and-orange-plastic chair for Malone. The writer started asking beginner-type questions that Eric fielded easily, with Buck and Hubbs contributing anecdotes now and then. The atmosphere was congenial, and the three pros soon succeeded in putting the newcomer at ease. Malone was eager to make contacts within the Jets organization, and eager not to appear eager. A pussycat.