Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue (2 page)

This simply is not the case. There will always be pockets of political discontent in the world; this is a fact of human nature we have to live with. There will always be some who love rebellion for its own sake rather than for any social good it might ultimately accomplish—not to mention the personal gratifications rebels find in acts of defiance. Satan, remember, rebelled against God not because he thought the divine order was wrong but because he wanted to be Numero Uno.

What happened in Honduras was a knee-jerk reaction. And in Burma—two isolated incidents of nastiness. The danger lies not so much in the military threat such mini-uprisings pose, but in the psychological damage they can inflict.

Any big action provokes a reaction. The uniting of the world's military resources is one of the biggest single actions mankind has ever taken. We should have expected what happened in Honduras. And we shouldn't be too surprised if it happens again, in some other place at some other time.

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MOBILE (AP)—Fifteen hundred defective World War II hand grenades were recently dumped into the Styx River in Alabama, according to Baldwin County Sheriff James Comer.

Recovery operations near the little town of Seminole, Alabama, began when two boys reported seeing a truck pull up to the bank of the Styx about midnight March 15. Sammy Turner and Billy Joe Welch said they were night fishing when four men began to unload large wooden crates from the truck and dump them into the river.

All the grenades examined were fitted with defective firing pins and were of the “pineapple” type issued by the U. S. Army during the Second World War. “Didn't know any of those were still around,” Sheriff Comer commented.

The old-style metal casing of the pineapple grenade was scored to break into forty chunks of iron on detonation. After World War II the pineapple was replaced by the M-26 hand grenade, designed to throw hundreds of tiny fragments of wire.

Both types of hand-thrown fragmentation grenades are now obsolete. UN Militiamen are equipped with chemical grenades (incendiary and tear gas) and rifle-launched antitank grenades.

The Styx River where the grenades were found is named after the mythological stream said to flow through Hades. This small southern river at one point marks the boundary between Alabama and Florida, leading to much local humor about which side of the river is supposed to be the netherworld.

CHAPTER 3

GNUS OF THE DAY

Q: What's nu?

A: Energy divided by Planck's constant
.

“How did it go?” Eric asked. “Did you catch the bad guys?”

“I don't know,” Shelby said tiredly as she dropped to the sofa. “They hustled me out once the suspect named a name they all wanted to hear.”

“So it was a wasted trip?”

Shelby shot an irritated glance at her husband. “No, I didn't say that. I told the police when their suspect was lying, and from that they were able to get their lead. I earned my fee.”

The corners of Eric's mouth lifted slightly. “I'm sure you did, dear.”

Shelby pressed her lips together and said nothing. Eric was one of those people who could make a term of endearment sound patronizing—his way of reminding her he wasn't exactly delighted with her growing reputation among the various police forces of the nation. Over and over he'd urged her to use her special gift with discretion. But whenever she'd tried to pin him down as to what he meant by “discretion,” he'd ended up hinting she should keep her lie-detecting abilities secret altogether.

“Did Tee call?” she asked.

“I don't know, I just got in myself.”

Shelby thought about calling her sister but couldn't summon up the energy. Why should one quick trip to Pittsburgh make her so tired? Eric was on the phone anyway, calling the neighborhood deli; Shelby was vaguely glad he'd taken the initiative. “Kosher okay?” he asked.

“Of course,” she answered.

When he'd hung up, he started out of the room but abruptly turned back. He bent over the sofa and kissed her lightly. “I can see you're tired,” he said in his nice-Eric voice. “Put your feet up and take it easy. I'm going to take a shower.” He switched on the television for her before he left.

A singing commercial urged Shelby to be sure to take all her income tax deductions. “Dew it for the wahhns yew luh-huv,” the singers intoned. “Go awn—dew it.”

The adenoidal singers gave way to a newscaster who acted beautifully his role of well-informed and deeply concerned Purveyor of Truth. He gazed sincerely into the camera lens as he explained the American government's latest inflationary counter-spiral program. Shelby drifted in and out of sleep.

And came fully awake. The newscaster was saying:

…
that the Honduran uprising failed because virtually all the weapons carried by the rebels were defective. The Hondurans were armed with lightweight .30 caliber carbines. These carbines are shortened infantry rifles first introduced by the U. S. Army during World War II and which have long since been superseded by more effective weapons such as the M-16 rifles. Almost all the carbines recovered from the Honduran insurrectionists had faulty spring mechanisms that prevented the rifles from firing. UN Intelligence is currently attempting to trace the source of these obsolete weapons
.

In Washington today …

Something teased at Shelby's memory as Eric came back in from his shower. Then she remembered. “Eric, that's the second time today—hm, you smell good—that there's been something in the news about defective weapons. Somebody dumped a bunch of useless grenades in some little southern river just a few days ago.”

“Oh, really?” Not interested.

“But the strange thing is that both times the weapons were obsolete. Dating from the Second World War. Where have they been all this time? Why would anyone hold on to defective old weapons?”

“Who knows? Life is just full of little mysteries.”

Shelby sighed. The cliché was true. Like she never would know what was in that package the Loser had passed on to Wee Willie Bascomb at the Oyster House in Pittsburgh.

“Where is that delivery boy?” Eric said irritably. “They told me half an hour.”

“It hasn't been that long. The news just went off.”

“They're only down the block, for Chrissake. Shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

“What's the matter? Why're you so grouchy?”

“Missed lunch today. I couldn't get away from the office.”

Shelby turned her head away from the pulsating red aura around her husband's body that told her he was lying. It was beginning to dawn on her that it wasn't the trip to Pittsburgh but coming home that had made her so tired.

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.