The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  The agent was sane of course while remaining within only one area of imagination. Sensing this, the agent tried to become the total revolutionary while in China—because that was demanded. But the other half kept insinuating itself, crying out its rights and the agent’s duties.

  So the agent solved it all, made peace out of what could have been an unsolvable conflict, by retreating deep into schizophrenia. Watching the other Americans, the agent listened and studied harder than anyone there, pounding every scrap of the information of every day into memory so that when the agent returned from China, America could be saved. By being forewarned, it would be forearmed against the revolutionary scourge.

  Yet—at the very same time—the agent resolved to bring havoc to America, to kill more men, women, and children than anyone had ever killed in history. The agent would destroy more property, and lay waste larger areas of more cities than had been done by all the conquerors of all the cities of the world in history before.

  The new insanity really helped: the agent became thereby the most modern of the new people, exquisitely capable of serving two masters.

  Part Two

  1

  April 1971

  General Marek’s unit at the Pentagon had temporarily been separated from any Army Intelligence activity other than Operation Enigma. He had assembled an Intelligence strike force of ninety-four people; they were officers, men, women, blacks and whites. He had settled them into the most intensive investigation of the backgrounds and motivations of the soldier Dr. Baum had had to kill to get them started, and the others Marek assumed were now in China. He assigned nine professional investigators to each of the names. He briefed each team exhaustively although mainly on the considerations that would lead to the single objective they had to achieve.

  “Somewhere in the United States there is a power grouping that organized these people—all from different cities and states—all entirely separate from each other—insofar as we know—until the time when they came together in Three Platoon. Most of these people seem the furthest possible distance in any society from being political types. It’s a pretty sure thing they had to be bribed to agree to what must be to them—these anti-authoritarian criminals and resenters—probably profound hardship. Bribing people to join the Army and desert to some unknown destination takes a lot of money. And how can they make it stick? Therefore, our job is to weave every recurring clue that pops up in the backgrounds of those people into a pattern that will lead us to the political power unit—inside the United States beyond a question of a doubt—the command unit of what may be a revolutionary force. We’ve got to find the people here who sent those people there. We’ve got to smash this thing, whatever it is, before it can get started.”

  In the second week of the investigation, Captain Maas, recalled from Saigon, was assigned to follow up the nuclear devices possibilities when it was determined that Albert Cassebeer, an experimental physicist, was missing from the laboratories at Las Cruces, New Mexico, and that his name matched that of one of the people who had disappeared from Three Platoon. After three months of intensive investigation Maas could find no trace of Cassebeer: He was a freak; an orphan, friendless, a bachelor who had spent all of his life at his work.

  Captain Maas told General Marek he wanted to go up to New York to run down a lead. “It could be a little tricky politically,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Well, this Cassebeer is gone and he didn’t leave a trace. Now that don’ mean he’d be the same Cassebeer that went into China, does it? Don’t answer. I’ll answer. No. It doesn’t. But it could be the same, couldn’t it?”

  “What could be a little tricky politically?” Marek asked.

  “Well, Cassebeer ain’t the only one who disappeared out at Las Cruces. Another experimental physicist name of Jonas Teel is gone. Teel is easier to run down an’ that’s why I was goin’ to New York. Jonas Teel’s sister is Agatha Teel, the big lady lawyer. The black lawyer who goes in and out of the White House.”

  “Be sure you check out all the angles before you talk to her at all, but don’t waste too much time. You know how to walk softly,” Marek said. “Wear your soft walking shoes.”

  In the fifth month of the investigation Captain Maas telephoned Agatha Teel at her office to ask if he could see her the following day. Teel invited him to dinner. Maas was on-the-dot prompt, in civilian clothes. He was a prematurely white-haired man with a woolly pate and the expression of a fat lady’s kneecap. Teel had prepared an all-out Mexican dinner. Captain Maas groaned with pleasure. “Oh, mercy! That is somethin’!” He had been about to begin his careful questioning, but now that he knew the kind of chuck she was coming up with he decided to eat first and talk later.

  After dinner they settled down in the library with a Montecristo in the Captain’s face and a glass of Laberdolive ’09 in his hand. It had been one of those perfect evenings, just him and this purty little nigger woman, one of the nicest celebrities he had met since Chill Wills.

  He had to prod himself to get talking. “Miz Teel? We wanted to ask you what you might be able to tell us about an Albert Cassebeer?”

  She felt a hot steel rod go right through her head at the temples, but she sipped at the armagnac before she answered, good and cool, “Albert Cassebeer?”

  “The experimental physicist?”

  “Do I know him? No, I never heard that name.”

  “Well, your brother is an experimental physicist. And they ain’t too many of them. We thought your brother mighta mentioned him?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “When did you see your brother last?” He spoke very carefully. He had put his soft-walking shoes on.

  “About three months ago.”

  “Recent letters?”

  “Has something happened to my brother?”

  “The fact is, Miz Teel—”

  “Jonas can’t be at Los Alamos or you’d be questioning him directly. Now, you just explain all this to me or I’m going to get on that telephone and call the President to find out.”

  “No need for that, Miz Teel,” Captain Maas said hurriedly. “This is jes’ a routine check jes’ like we allus got to do when these kind of people don’t show up for work.”

  “Then Jonas is not at Los Alamos?” She made her eyes fill with tears of relief that they knew much less than the shocking amount they had told her.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then where is he? Goddammit, where is he?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You know more than you’re telling me and if I have to do it, I’m going to turn this administration upside down until you tell me everything you know about my brother.”

  “He could be at a guerrilla training camp inside China. We know that’s where either your brother or Albert Cassebeer is right now.”

  “China?” She felt glacial. A great distance now separated her from Captain Maas and the rest of the world.

  She collected her genius like an armful of spears. It was open-and-shut that they knew the who, what, when, and where. They had to be kept from finding the why, and the who behind the who. Tough, committed genius pushed her forward into the arena, as she thought about beginning her own investigations from the White House downward, to find out how much they did know, and simultaneously about how to mollify and neutralize Captain Maas to get him out of her life. She put up a bleak front. “There is no steadier or more loyal man than my brother in the United States of America,” she said. “If he is in China then I say flatly that he was kidnapped to China because of his knowledge of nuclear devices. My brother is incapable of disloyalty to his country.”

  As soon as Captain Maas left at 11:20, Teel telephoned William Buffalo. She had to call four numbers before she reached him. “Mr. B.,” she said amiably, “they is a very big package coming in tonight and nobody but me can take it from them because that’s the only way they’ll do it. They said I could bring one man with me, and I’d feel best if that man was you.”r />
  “You got the deal,” William Buffalo said. “Where we gone blend?”

  “Can you make it the corner of Park and Thirty-seventh, like in front of the Matson Foundation?”

  “Locked in. When?”

  “Twelve fifteen?”

  “See you there,” he said.

  They got out of the car at an empty stretch on the Belt Parkway. Teel apologized, then shot William Buffalo to death. She drove back to town feeling blue. He was a good man, but with the whole American government after just one name, that name, William Buffalo, had to keep turning up as they rolled those histories over and over and over. When every one of, say, 150 sources on the backgrounds of those twelve people had been put through the sieve, it had to come out—sooner or later—that the one thing they had in common was William Buffalo.

  If they had gotten to Buffie, she had to believe Buffie had told them what he knew—how he had recruited the people now inside China, and who had told him to recruit them—because Buffie would have made his deal to give information and names in return for guarantees that they keep their hands off the business. She had to proceed with that belief. Buffie was a good old boy, and so was everybody else. If they hadn’t reached him, then maybe she had wasted a good man. If they had already reached him, she still had Senator Hobart Simms’s sister under a lock in China. She would be able to trade her way out with that.

  2

  1971–1974

  Jonas Teel spent three years at the nuclear energy station at Hupeh among cultivated Harvard-trained Chinese—and French, German and English scientists of considerable note. The distinguished foreigners came and went, never staying longer than six months. The characteristic view they all shared, however, was that the effects of nuclear bomb damage had been distorted and exaggerated; that the largest nuclear device ever exploded as a bomb was sixty megatons, merely one thousandth the force of an earthquake, one thousandth the force of a hurricane; that mankind had lived with earthquakes and hurricanes for a long, long time; and that fear of nuclear devices was merely a collective ego trip by which insect-sized man was able to believe he could actually blow up the earth and end the world. But they agreed that “dirty” bombs with millions of times the explosive force, in terms of human killing power, were, by and large, nasty things. Mostly, Jonas noticed, the distinguished theoretical physicists tended to keep classical music playing all day, while the experimental physicists always preferred that any music be turned off; they would much rather relax with billiards. Jonas learned a lot about billiards in the Hupeh Province, playing on a five-by-ten-foot antique table that had been imported from Australia at a cost of 100,000 Australian dollars, to keep the experimental physicists happy. It had been hand carved out of Tasmanian blackwood by the Scottish craftsman, A.W. Thomson, featuring, in magnificent carvings, the British and Australian flora and fauna of the late nineteenth century.

  Jonas was there to learn how to design and build bombs; to reduce their bulk with technology and imagination so that they could be easily transportable in suitcases by guerrilla bomb squads much in the way that plastiques had been used in Paris during the Algerian war; the way gelignite was used by the IRA to blow up automobiles and children. When he arrived at the facility, the bomb’s delivery package was about the size of a youth’s sled. When he left the Hupeh Province to attend the War College, the bulk of the essential bomb with its sixty kilograms of uranium-235 was about the size of a baseball, a design greatly to Jonas Teel’s own credit.

  He had faced these problems as a bomb designer: sixty kilograms of U-235, in metallic form, weigh 132 pounds. The metal is compact, almost twice as dense as lead. As a cube, the sixty kilograms would measure about half a foot to a side. A nuclear explosion is a chain reaction which moves so fast that pressures build up in the material and blow it apart.

  Jonas sweated over methods of delivering less of the critical mass of U-235 than had been delivered at Hiroshima—say, twenty kilograms (smaller than a grapefruit), because such a mass can yield an explosion equivalent to anything from a few tons of TNT up to hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT. It all depended on efficient design.

  Jonas was, other than the Chinese establishment at the facility, the only full-time experimental resident. As blocks developed, as imponderables appeared, he had the full collaboration for two to six months at a time of the outstanding nuclear scientists of the western world whose countries maintained diplomatic relationships with the Chinese government and who affected to be in China to assist in the organization of nuclear energy for Chinese industry.

  He succeeded, at the end of his second year in Hupeh, in designing a packaged nuclear device containing nine pounds of fissionable U-235 in a space slightly larger than one of the old-time, “turnip” pocket watches. It would achieve the detonated equivalent of 420,000 tons of TNT, a force more mercilessly destructive inside a great American city than any hurricane or earthquake.

  3

  1971–1974

  “I mean, I tell you,” Jane Bossle Weems said at the Women’s Camp, “this here place is like the Garden of Eden. Man, you jest try tasting the food in them American prisons. And the broads! Ech!”

  They followed the same curricula as the Men’s Camp. Everybody was exhausted and, at first, pretty frightened by what they were being trained to do. “Shit, I like tough, man,” Winn said. “But this is somepin else, I’m tellin’ you. This Gr-1 thing. What kinda way is that to kill somebody? Push ’em outa windows to look like they commit suicide!”

  “It’ll get easier,” Duloissier said. “You keep doin’ it and it gets easier. That goes for everything lousy, you know what I mean?”

  “What they are telling us,” Chelito told them, “is that we got to do this and all the people who fight with us got to do this because we do it straight to the people and for once, for once in their whole lives, the American people knows what war is and maybe, now, when this happen to them—they hate war.”

  “I think Chelito is right,” Enid said. “We can make life very, very precious for them, I think. I never cared much for life—except when I was with my brother. But now, I don’t know, everything we are learning to do is so far beyond pity or forgiveness, so completely vicious and inhuman, that it is what we were never meant to be. I can believe that now. I really can.”

  “Well, I don’ think about it,” Jane Bossle Weems said. “You fucked ever’ time if you starts thinkin’, I’m tellin’ you. The food is good and the sex is right. The clothes is warm and the people act fine. Well, comes the payoff. We owe them. What do they want? They want us to blow up a few thousand li’l babies. I ask you—what’s so bad about that?” She began to cry. Winn and Enid led her off to the infirmary. They gave her some pills and she said she felt better. She told them she was crying because she was having a hard time with a pretty little Arab girl over at Camp Saud, a sweet little girl who just played around and played around until Janie Bossle didn’t know where she was at. “And I’ll tell you something else,” she said to them fiercely on the way back to the dormitory. “I ain’t gone blow up no babies, no matter who.”

  But the re-indoctrination changed all that, just as motion pictures, television, a responsive press, comic books, novels, advertising, gadgets and gimmicks—and the sense of a loss of God—had bent the American mind too into eager acceptance of any kind of murder, loss of passion or hope of innocence. It took longer that way. In order to create hollow men, an American child had to be led to the tube at twenty months and left there until the football season was over and he was sixty-three. But, at Camps Fritchie and Cody, the best minds of their generation had devised ways to achieve that terrible loss by a crash course. Within two years there wasn’t a woman at Fritchie who would flinch at blowing up a few thousand babies.

  The first winter was bitterly cold, but there was no let-up on the outdoor training—they all just ate twice as much. As time went by, as they moved up, each year, in knowledge and, above all, understanding of what it was they were being trained to do,
they became quieter and more deliberate; steadier and deadlier. Life was operating by stealth, leaving the world to bleed to death behind them in silence as they darted away in shadows. Everything they could hit seemed made to maim or to kill. Mastering the arts of massive terror, they became themselves calm, mobile and icy. As they moved up, class by class, new arrivals came to the camp from Germany, Paraguay, Egypt, Holland, Zaïre, Italy and Japan. In the final days of the third year the six senior women at Fritchie were moved out of the lakeside camp at Hei-ma-ho to the guerrilla War College at Karlik Tagh, also called K’a-erh-li-k’o Shan, 4,925 feet high in the eastern Sinkiang Province, 80 miles from the Mongolian Frontier.

  All the American women made tearful farewells with Major Wong. They knew they would never see him again. “You have been a wonderful class, a really moving class,” he said brokenly (for him) in his Pomona, California, accent.

  “You the greatest piece of poontang I ever had, man or woman,” Sally Winn said, her lip hobbling. “You a little guy and you pecker don’t look like much but, man, do you know how to use it!”

  Enid told him softly, “I can honestly say, Cal, that the off-duty afternoon hours I spent with you will always remain among the high points of my life. You are an artist.”

  The Americans, men and women, had finished three years of intensive field training on every conceivable guerrilla problem. They were ready now for more abstract studies: the problems of commanders of large units of guerrilla troops and the efficient uses of staff and line officers. They reported to the War College separately, twenty-three women of mixed nationalities and a selection of thirty-eight men. For the third year running Kranak had led all others as an achiever. He was voted by faculty and student body to be the best officer material the camps had ever produced. He was certain to make the uppermost available American command.