Bay City Blast

Chapter fifteen

The tractor trailer was parked around the corner from City Hall. It took up parking spots at three meters and when the policeman on the beat first saw it at 10:20 A.M., he realized he had a problem.

Since the red flags were up on three meters, did he give it three parking tickets or one parking ticket? A difficult question but, under its last mayor, the Bay City police department had made it a point to send all their patrolmen to leadership training classes, and since he had graduated third in the class, the policeman did not hesitate more than a few seconds. He wrote two parking tickets, neatly halving the difference between regulations and compassion which was one of the things they learned in leadership class.

He also looked for the driver in the two luncheonettes on the block but did not find him. He therefore made another leadership decision. If he came back at 11 a.m. and the truck was still parked there, he would write one more additional ticket. That would total three tickets for three parking spaces. He regarded this as a neat solution to a complicated problem and told himself that neither the chief nor the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association would have been able to figure it out, because they were not part of the new breed of cops.

At ten to eleven, Sam Gregory, who had been leaning on a light pole across the street from City Hall, reading a newspaper, saw the mayor's car go into the City Hall parking lot. He started to walk back to the truck.

At two minutes to eleven, the patrolman again turned the corner at the end of the street. He saw the truck still parked there. He had his ticket pad open as he walked down the block toward it.

As he drew near the truck, the back doors of the vehicle swung open wide. Two heavy metal ramps clanged out of the truck onto the street. The cop stopped. It couldn't be.

He blinked and looked again.

It was.

An Army tank, painted olive drab, chugged down the steel ramps. The ramps buckled under the weight of the tank, but the war machine reached the pavement in one piece. It totaled a Volkswagen in the parking spot behind the truck, then made a U-turn and headed toward City Hall.

The policeman wondered what to do. Leadership training hadn't covered tanks. Maybe he should call headquarters. On the other hand, maybe it was a tank for a parade. But if they were going to have a parade, they should have told him about it.

Leadership required that. It wasn't Armed Forces Day. It wasn't even Memorial Day. But who the hell knew? Everybody had parades nowadays. The Germans and the Italians and the Irish and the Puerto Ricans. Who knew? Maybe it was the annual parade of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They might feature tanks. He decided he would not embarrass himself by calling headquarters and appearing dumb. He would wait until he saw what happened. He put his ticket book away and walked slowly after the tank as it lumbered down the middle of the block.

It turned the corner into the street fronting City Hall.

The driver of a white diesel Oldsmobile saw it coming at him and drove up on the curb, smashing into a parking meter to avoid getting hit. When the car's engine died, the driver realized it was the first time in weeks that his ears hadn't hurt from the motor's noise.

The driver shook a fist at the tank. He was about to charge it and scream at the driver when he realized the driver wouldn't or couldn't hear him. He continued shaking his fist. He wondered what else he could do to vent his anger, when he saw the turret of the tank open and a dark-faced man with a swoop of thick black hair over his forehead stick his head out. He was carrying guns in both hands. The Oldsmobile driver decided not to argue with the guns. The eyes of the man in the tank turret were darting little pinpoints, flashing as he looked from side to side.

The policeman who had been trailing the tank reached the corner just as the tank turned in the middle of the street so that it was facing City Hall.

The tank stood still but its motor kept chugging. The Oldsmobile driver realized that the tank idled more quietly than his diesel did.

"Hey," the cop called. "Hey, you in the tank." He had decided that this was no parade, and even if it was, the assembly spot sure wasn't the middle of the street in front of City Hall. The man in the top of the tank turned toward him.

"Hey, you can't park there," the cop yelled at Mark Tolan.

"No?" said Tolan. The cop drew his ticket book from his right hip. Tolan shot him in the left side of the chest.

Inside City Hall, Remo and Chiun were in the mayor's office with Rocco Nobile, who was hanging his jacket on the old-fashioned coat rack in the corner.

They all heard the noise out front and went to the window. As they looked out through the large double panes of glass, they saw the cannon on the front of the tank lift up, until it was pointing at them like a long accusing finger. On top of the tank, half in half out, Remo recognized the looney who hated ping pong. Behind him, in the street, was a dead policeman. Remo gritted his teeth, then turned to Chiun, but Chiun was not there. As Remo continued turning, he saw Chiun race across the room, dragging Mayor Nobile to the floor.

"Down, Remo," called Chiun and Remo hit the floor just as an artillery shell slammed into the side of the building just below the picture window. Brick and mortar flew into the room, dropping on Remo's body. A foot-wide hole opened in the front of the building. The glass above Remo trembled and cracked, and glass shards fell onto his body.

"To the door," Chiun hissed.

Remo moved toward the big oaken doors. Behind him he could hear the faint sound of another shell before it slammed into the wall of the building with an ear-splitting crash.

He pulled open the door and Chiun dragged Rocco Nobile out of the office. Secretaries were scattering. Remo closed the oaken doors and turned to Chiun.

"Get him out of here, Chiun," said Remo.

"Where are you going?"

"After those nuts," Remo said. "You get to the parking lot and get him out of here."

Chiun nodded. Remo moved out into the marble-floored hallway. Behind him he heard another shell rip the front of the building. It had been years since he had heard tank shells exploding around him.

When he got to the front steps of the building, the tank was still firing away at the mayor's office. Remo saw that the hard-faced man had gone from the tank turret and when he got outside, he saw the man, waving two guns, running down the block on the left side of the building.

That would take him to the parking lot, Remo realized. That could have been the plan all along. To drive the mayor out of his office by tank and then pick him off with a bullet in the parking lot.

Remo followed the man. As he passed under the open windows of the mayor's second floor office, another shell exploded above him and rocks and debris fell down toward his body. He dodged the flying rocks and got to the sidewalk just in time to see the hard-faced Mark Tolan climb the fence into the parking lot.

Remo raced after him.

Chiun led the mayor down the back steps of the city hall building to the parking lot.

Before he stepped outside, he looked carefully both ways. No one was in the lot except the parking attendant with the rum nose and plaid shirt, who was sitting in a city car, reading Playboy magazine.

Chiun nodded to Nobile and they walked quickly toward the mayor's car.

Just as Chiun opened the door, he heard a voice behind them,

"Hey, Chinkie, that's as far as you go."

He turned to see the brooding dark-haired man staring at them. He had a pistol in each hand. Chiun moved in front of the mayor and hissed to him softly: "Into the car and down."

Nobile moved back from Chiun and into the car, trying to fit himself onto the floor on the passenger's side. His hand reached up to unlock the door, and he pulled the handle so that the door was open, in case he had to roll through it.

"That won't do any good," Mark Tolan said to Chiun. He had a smile on his face, a twisted smile that involved only his mouth. His eyes remained cold. "I'll shoot right through you to get to him."

"Have to shoot through me first," said a voice from behind Tolan.

Tolan wheeled just as Remo lightly vaulted the low cyclone fencing which surrounded the parking lot. He was ten feet from Tolan.

"Yeah," Tolan said. He savored the moment. Three people to kill and more maybe might come. Yeah, it was going to be a good day. A good day for dying.

"Well, well, well," he said. "If it ain't the other ping pong player."

"Are you The Eraser?" Remo asked.

"No. I'm The Exterminator."

"Cute," said Remo. "Any other fancy names?"

"The two guys you killed. That was The Lizzard and The Baker."

"Then who the hell's The Eraser?" Remo demanded.

"In the tank," Tolan said. "What's your name? Ping Pong?"

Remo looked across the ten feet of distance and smiled and his smile was colder and more heartless than Tolan's.

"Me?" Remo intoned the words softly. "I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. You don't know what that means, do you?"

"No," said Tolan.

"It means you're done, axe-face."

They should have been in the parking lot by now, Sam Gregory realized, so he put his tank into "drive" and began to chug forward, around the corner back toward the lot, where he was supposed to pick up The Exterminator. He heard a few cartridges pinging off the heavy armor of the tank and smiled. Almost all done.

Remo moved across the blacktop toward Mark Tolan. Tolan let him come. The closer the target, the bigger the hole. At five feet, he fired with the Gregory Sur-Shot in his right hand.

And missed.

Remo went down below the fragmenting slugs as if he had slipped down an open elevator shaft. Then he was on his feet again and before Tolan could squeeze off another round, he felt the gun slapped from his hand and heard its metallic clink on the pavement.

As Remo raised his hands toward Tolan, the burly man lifted his left hand and fired his .357 Magnum at Remo but even as he pressed the trigger, he knew it would miss, because Remo was no longer in front of him. The bullet fired with a loud crack. Tolan could see instantly crazed glass where the slug splintered its way through the windows of three parked automobiles.

Tolan felt a tap on his shoulder and, as he turned, the Magnum was knocked from his hand. And the crazy ping pong player was behind him and Tolan thought, yeah, well, he's good at dodging bullets but I'm fifty pounds heavier than he is and I'm going to tear his throat out with my hands and, yeah, if I like it, maybe I'll switch to using my hands from now on and he reached up and put his two big ham fists around the thin man's throat.

"Destroyer, huh? Try this destroyer," Tolan said. He began to squeeze with all the power in his bulky muscles. Remo did not stop smiling.

If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Sam Gregory would never have believed it.

He stopped the tank in the middle of the street near the parking lot. He saw Tolan inside the lot with his hands around the neck of a thin dark-haired man. It was the man he'd seen the night before at the Bay City Improvement Association.

The thin man slowly raised his hands and pressed his thumbs into Tolan's wrists and Tolan's hands separated and dropped from the man's throat.

The thin man was talking to Tolan but Gregory couldn't hear what he said...

"...You kill those little girls at headquarters last night?" Remo asked.

Tolan did not answer. He was trying desperately to make his hands move but they felt as if they had been dipped into plaster of Paris and left to dry for six days.

"I asked you a question," Remo said. He punched an index finger softly into Tolan's ear lobe.

"Yes, yes," Tolan shrieked. He had never known an ear lobe could hurt like that.

"And that poor Chinese family?"

"Drug dealers," Tolan gasped. "Yes. I did it."

"You're The Exterminator," Remo said. "When I'm done with you, there won't be enough left for roach paste."

Gregory put his eyes closer to the narrow slit through which a tank commander could see the battlefield in front of him. As he watched, he saw the bulky muscular Tolan being lifted in the air, above the head of the thin man. The thin man whirled gently, not with any obvious muscular effort as with a shot putter or discus thrower, but as if he were doing a gentle dance step, and then Tolan was slamming through the air. His body traveled twenty feet and then, like a spear, it went headfirst through the front windshield of the car owned by the city's deputy director of community improvement.

Tolan hit with a shudder, like a javelin sticking into the ground, and then the lower part of his body buckled and his knees banged down on the hood of the new Mercedes.

Gregory shuddered inside the safe confines of his tank. He hadn't thought making war on the Mafia was going to be easy, but this was ridiculous. It was time to retire to reconsider his situation.

Then he saw something else. There was an old Oriental standing in front of a car on the far side of the parking lot and as the Oriental moved away, behind him Gregory could see Mayor Rocco Nobile crawling out of the car.

He could not pass up the opportunity. Gregory wheeled the tank turret around. Here was his chance. He could put a shell into the Mafia mayor's midsection.

But as he lowered the barrel of the cannon into position, his eyes met those of the Oriental. And while their eyes locked, the ancient yellow man began walking across the parking lot toward the tank and Gregory realized what he was looking at. He was looking into the eyes of death and at that moment, he decided that from here on, it would be live and let live between himself and the Mafia and all these strange people they had working for him.

He put the tank in drive gear again and began rumbling down the street toward the city's piers. Behind him, straggled out, was a crowd of city policemen, ineffectively firing pistol bullets at the huge olive drab machine.

Nobile ran up behind Remo and Chiun.

"Is that The Eraser?" he asked.

"I guess so," Remo said. "I can't keep track of all these ninnies and their names." He turned to Chiun. "We'd better go after him." He nodded to the mayor. "You stay here."

"Not on your life."

"No. On yours. And tell those cops to stop shooting. They're liable to hit something. Like us," Remo said. He and Chiun hurdled the low fence and ran off after the speeding tank.

"Stop that goddamn shooting," Nobile yelled at a police captain.

The captain nodded as if that was the sensible command he had been waiting for since the start of this incident and shouted for his men to holster their guns. The firing stopped and the captain looked back toward Nobile for approval, but the mayor had already darted back into his car, started it up, and was driving down the street after the tank and Remo and Chiun.

He wondered what kind of men they were and where in the government they had come from. What they did, he had never seen done before, and it made him feel a little better to know that they were on his country's side.

Behind him, the police captain was confused. He had not done all that well in leadership class and now he did not know what to do. Should he follow the mayor or wait for further orders? He decided to follow at a safe distance. No one could fault him for that. He hoped.

The tank got to the waterfront before Remo and Chiun did. Sam Gregory stuck his head out of the turret and saw the white man and the Oriental following him. They were only half a block away. Behind them came speeding Rocco Nobile's car.

It was a good thing he had thought of everything, Gregory realized as he clambered up out of the turret, jumped to the ground and ran down the concrete pier.

An eighteen-foot power boat was tied up to one of the large pilings and Gregory untied the line, then dropped down into the boat. The motor started up instantly, as he turned the key and pressed the automatic starter.

He pulled away from the pier twenty feet, then let the motor idle.

Remo and Chiun stood on the edge of the pier, looking down at him. Rocco Nobile's car screeched to a stop, and the mayor ran up between the other two men. All looked out at Sam Gregory.

He shook his fist at them.

"Maybe you win this round," he called. "But I'll be back. I'm coming after you. The Eraser will get you all."

"Oh, no," said Remo. He moved toward the edge of the pier to dive in and swim after the boat, but Chiun restrained him with a hand on his arm.

Gregory saw Remo poised at the edge and threw the boat into high speed and surged away toward the open waters of the Hudson River.

Remo looked at Chiun with surprise. "Why not?" he said. "I don't want to have to deal with him again later."

"Never send a boy to do a boom's job," Chiun said.

He scurried back toward the tank, hopped up on its side and vanished inside. As Remo and Nobile watched, the turret began to swing around. Then the cannon lowered until it was pointing out at the fleeing power boat.

The roar as the cannon exploded crackled in their ears. They looked out into the river and saw the boat of Sam Gregory explode. Wood and metal and body flew high into the air, as the tank shell ripped into it. As they kept watching, the waters slowly subsided into their normal thick stillness. All that was left visible were a few chunks of heavy wood.

Nobile looked at Remo as Chiun returned to their side.

"It looks like The Eraser's been erased," Nobile said.

There was only one thing left to do.

They had done a pretty good job of covering up the earlier incidents but there was no covering this one up, Remo knew. Bay City was zero as far as a safe city was concerned.

While Rocco Nobile began telling the late-arriving policemen what to do, Remo went to a pay telephone on the end of the pier, and dialed Harold W. Smith's number.

When the CURE director came on the telephone, Remo said, "Move now. We blew it."

"What happened?"

"We got The Eraser and that whole gang of clowns. But they had a tank and they bombed City Hall, and I think every goon in this city is probably packing now. If you want to get any of them, you'd better move fast."

"Sounds like your usual neat job," Smith said.

"Smitty, I don't have time for your sarcasm. Are you going to move or not?"

"I already have," Smith said. "A federal task force is already in town, picking up everybody in sight." He paused. "What about Nobile?"

"He's okay, Smitty."

"Did he find out anything about you? About us?"

"No," Remo said.

"Good. Then why don't you just get him out of town safely? He'll know where to hide and what to do."

Remo knew the alternative. If Rocco Nobile had found out about CURE, Remo's assignment would have been quite different. It would have been simply to kill Rocco Nobile, lest he ever say anything about CURE.

"Sounds good to me, Smitty. See ya."

When he hung up and turned around, Rocco Nobile was standing there.

He nodded toward the telephone.

"Checking in?" he asked.

"Yeah. They already started picking up the mobbies in town."

"Good," said Nobile. "I guess it's time for Rocco Nobile to vanish."

"Yeah, it is," Remo said.

They walked together toward the mayor's car. Chiun already sat in the back seat, doing his finger tapping exercise for digital dexterity.

At the door of the car, Nobile looked up at the taller Remo.

"I couldn't help but overhear," he said. "Did you say 'Smitty' on the telephone?"

" 'Smitty?' " Remo said. "Why would I say 'Smitty?' " He pretended to think for a moment. "Oh, I know what you heard. I said this was a shitty deal. You misheard me."

He looked hard at Rocco Nobile who stared back, and then let his face relax into a smile.

"I guess you're right," he said.

"Good," said Remo. "I'm glad you feel that way." And he was.