Such a lot of it was by rote, repeated from
The Green Ripper memory in a sentence structure alien to her usual patterns. "How do we do it, Sister?"
"We make the oppressors visible to the people by giving them reason to show how cruel and tough they can be. We force them to react. Like Chicago and Kent State, but much much more."
"By going out and kiUing people?"
'`That isn't the purpose, Brother. To kill people. Our civilization has gotten too complicated. It's full of machines and plastics. Brother Persival says it is very sick, and like a sick person, it can't survive if a lot of other things happen to it."
"Such as?"
"Oh, we won't go after things that are really protected, like army places and shipyards and nuclear power plants and government buildings. That's dumb. You can bring everything tumbling down by going after things that would take years to fix. Big gas pipelines and oil pipelines. Bridges and tunnels and big computer places. Refineries and chemical plants and control towers. TV stations and newspaper pressrooms. Blow 'em up and burn 'em down. Targets of opportunity. Anyway, it's all being worked out. And then we'll know what our part of it is. I hope I don't get stuff to do that's too hard. I mean I want to be able to get it done. Then if I get away, okay, and if I don't, okay. But Ed hate to mess up. I hope I don't get a tunnel. I get really itchy going through tunnels. I think of all that water coming down on me."
"How do you do a tunnel?"
"Two people and two vehicles, right? Lee one is an old truck. You've got a good big load of explosives, labeled something else. It takes a big blast. The lead car stops and you stop the truck and yank the wire that starts the three-minute timer. Then you run and get in the lead car and get out of there. It's the same for some kinds of bridges. I really don't want to do a tunnel. They make me so nervous 111 do something wrong."
She had turned onto her side, worked her head onto my shoulder. Her arm lay across my chest, her knees against the side of my thigh. She sighed and said, Y didn't have any interest in sex at all until I was in training overseas. Then it started to all come back. It's like that with most of the women who join. I mean the Church becomes the most important love life you have, and it wipes out every~bing else for a while. Then it's never as important again as it once was to you." She kissed the side of my throat and said, 'enough of all this talking already? You want to make * now?" She snugged the length of her body against me. This was a frightening little engine of destruction, all trained, primed, touthoned, waiting only for someone to aim it at a target. Her breath had a faint scent of the deerburger onions. Her hair smelled clean, and her body had a slight coppery odor of perspiration. I remembered noticing at the table that her fingernails were chewed down to the quick.
The Green Ripper
Poor lithe assassin. She had gone out into the world with an empty head, and somebody had crammed a single frightful idea into it, dressed up with a lot of important-sounding rhetoric. She couldn't know the frightfulness of the idea because she had nothing by which to measure it. Fifteen to forty groups of from eight to fifteen? From a hundred and twenty to six hundred of them. So take the smallest number, cut it in half, and think about sixty people like this one, armed, mobilized, superbly equipped, and aimed at the pressure points of our culture.
I remembered one of Meyer's concepts about cultural resiliency. In the third world, the village of one thousand can provide itself with what it needs for survival. Smash the cities and half the villages, and the other half keep going. In our worbl, the vii" lage of one thousand has to import water, fuel, food, clothing, medicine, electric power, and entertainment. Smash the cities and an the viBages die. And the city itself is frail. It has little nerve-center nodules. Water plant, power transmission lines, telephone switching facilities.
I was begmmog to learn the purpose behind Brother Titus, and the reason for all the extraordinary caution.
And if that extraordinary caution carried over to an things, and assuming the trailer was not bugged, then Stella would be asked to give a report about her lovemaking with Brother Thomas.
"Oh, all we did was talk. He asked ~ lot of questions and we talked, and then after all that, he didn't want to. He said he wasn't gay, but he just didn't feel like it."
She had begun to use her hooker skills, and I had begun to respond to her. After all, what the helL She was skillful and knowing. To her I was a tumescence of a certain length and girth, differing hardly at all from the many hundreds of others. Emotions need not be involved. I would think only of sensation. It did not have to have anything to do with mind and memory. As I began to switch roles from submission to domination, I told myself I could not, in any circumstances, Mink about the face and body and love of Gretel Howard.
I sagged back beside Stella and she said, "Hey, what happens?"
'Em sorry."
"Did something about me put you off, honey?"
"No. It wasn't anything like that I Vhat then?"
'I don't know."
This sure isn't turning out to be one of my better nights."
'Tm sorry."
"Look, Fm not sore. You know what I think it was? It was being conned into shooting Nicky like you did. Something like that, if you're not used to it, can really shake you up inside. And then me coming in here like this when you weren't expecting
The Green Ripper it. And after all, Brother, you are not some eighteen-year-old guy who can get it off before he's unzipped. These things happen. Don't worry about me. I lost it too. Too much talking."
"rm sorry."
'4Let's just talk. I kind of like talking to you. And maybe we can have a little nap, and after that maybe we'll both be okay again, you know? How about that?"
'`All right."
"You sure I didn't spoil it for you somehow?',
'`No. You're... an attractive woman."
'`I'm not much. Eve got a pretty good body, compared to most. But I've got this tough yellowy skin, and if you look close, one eye points out a little bit, the right one. And the receding jaw. You know, I was saving up for an operation, a fellow that puts some kind of bone from your hip or someplace back here by the corners of your jaw and that pushes it forward, and then they fix your bite. I saw before-and-after pictures. It would really make a big difference. But that's vanity, isn't it? 1~11 be twenty-six in two months. I used to think about marriage and babies. I think I'd be okay with babies. Better than they were with me, I know.- My dad broke two fingers on my left hand once, grabbing me when he lost his temper. They say if you've been abused, you abuse your own. I can't believe that. I'd be okay with kids. But there's no point in even thinking about it now, is there? By this time next year, I'll probably be dead. Like Nicky. He just went a little ahead of the rest of us."
"Are they supposed to be suicide missions?"
'`Not really. Everybody is supposed to do their best to get away. And we'll be given a staging area to go to where we can be regrouped and re- equipped and given new assignments. But if a person keeps doing it, how many times can you get away?"
"Everything will be in a state of confusion."
"You can believe it."
"But you know who is going to suffer the most, don't you?"
"Sure. The bottom layer of society. The poor and the minorities and the old ones. They won't have the money to take care of themselves when the food and the water and the medicines run out. They won't be able to run. That's when they'll rise up against the state. Then there'll be some kind of burning and killing. That's when the whole thing goes to hell for sure."
"And who takes charge after that's all over?"
"The Church has plans, Brother. Big plans. You just wait. Big plans." Her voice trailed away and her breathing changed and deepened. A woman of her times. Ready to aim the Circle of Fire, belly high Happy to be caressed, glad to make love. Good with babies, and no good with tunnels.
I had blundered into something extraordinary. A
The Green Ripper cult that was a cover for a deadly activism. Supported by curious international cooperations. I wished I could talk to Meyer about it. I really had nothing to go on. I knew the temporary location of nine people and a cache of arms and explosives. One out of fifteen or forty of unknown size and location, of unknown target date. Meyer had said, many times, that we run a strange kind of country in the mod- ern world. Customs and Immigration are in a sense token services. Any plausible-looking person can find many ways to come and go unimpeded. Anything that can be flown or Boated can be brought in or taken out. We are a wide place in the road in the middle of the world, and they wander through, back and forth, marveling at the lack of restraints. It is, Meyer pointed out, a paradox. The openness which endangers our system is the product of the policy which says that to close our borders and enforce all our rules and back them up with guns would change the system just as completely as any alien force.
I hoped there were enough tough young men like Max and Jake. I hoped somebody had this whole operation taped and wired. I hoped there were long lenses peering through the pine forests, and a lot of career people making little marks on important maps.
Gray daylight was seeping into the trailer when I awakened. She was standing beside the bunk, pull ing the long T-shirt down over her head, smoothing it to the contours of her hips with the backs of her hands.
She smiled and leaned and kissed me lightly. "Hey, we slept too long. I got to go on kitchen duty. We11 try it another time?"
"Sure."
"Listen, don't worry about me saying anything, okay? I mean about you couldn't get it up. You're worried about a lot of things. All this is new to you, right? And your daughter missing and all. Anybody asks me, I'll say we like to screwed ourselves to death."
"Thanks, Sister." :
Don't you worry about a Ding. Everything is going to be okay for you here. We'll an be looking out for you, Brother Thomas."
I heard the door close and she was gone. I rolled up in the two scratchy blankets and thought about Gretel in her agony, Gretel on fire. I knew how she would react if I could tell her she had been a victim of some kind of crazy political action cult, of people who wanted to remake the world by tearing it down and starting all over again. Cave people, trying to reinvent penicillin, Zippo lighters, and disco.
It has nothing to do with me, I told Gretel. I never think about stuff like this. It hurts my head. I think about the blue sea and tan ladies and straight
The Green Ripper gin with lots of ice. I think about how high out of the water a marlin might go, and how much of Meyer's chili I can eat, and how very good piano sounds in the nighttime. I think about swimming until I hurt, running until I wheeze, driving good cars and good boats and good bargains. Sure, I do my little knightlike thing, restoring goodies to the people from whom they were improperly wrested, doing battle with the genuinely evil bastards who prey on the gullible, helpless, and innocent. I was going to keep on doing that from time to time, to support you and me, girl, in the style we like best, if you had consented. I know from nothing about terrorism, funny churches, and exotic murder weapons, like the one they killed you with.
But here I am. In a sense, I was hunting for you.
I have killed one of them in a strange way. And nearly made love to another. I am in it now. I am going to let them run me and see what happens. And I swear before whatever gods there be, including even the one these crazies bow down to, that if they give me the faintest whispery breath of a chance, I am going to blow them all away, every one, without mercy, without hesitation. If I saw a fire starting in a kindergarten, I would throw water on it.
One down and nine to go. This time, my dead love, I am not doing my knightly routine. I have shelved that as inappropriate for the occasion. The old tin-can knight had too many compunctions, scruples, whatevers. For this caper, I am the iceman. I have come here and brought the ice. It is a delivery service. One time only.
On Thursday, two days after Christmas, I had my first experience of listening to Sister Elena Marie. It was set up at midafternoon in a small cement-block building the same size as the one where I had been locked up.
Chairs and stools were brought in. The camp generator was cranked up. A Sony color set rested on a low table, with a videotape deck beside it. Blankets were hung to shut out the light from the two windows. There was a feeling of expectancy, a muted excitement. Alvor was the only one missing. Stella sat close beside me.
Persival, almost invisible in the dimness, said, '~et us pray. Our Father, we thank thee for the op portunities which are being given to us. We are humbly grateful to be given- a chance to play a part in the great events which will reshape life in this world and the future of humanity. We pray that we will be worthy of your trust in us. Our strength, our resolve, our determination, will all flow from your endless power. Since last we met in this room, one of us has been taken to your kingdom. Forgive our Brother Nicholas for his transgressions, his failure to comprehend the stern disciplines required of your children. There is a new one among us, a Brother Thomas, who came to us in search of his daughter and who has been thinking of remaining with us, adopting our Vows, our ways, and our great mission. He is still uncertain, Lord. He is still confused. We are healing his lonely heart. Please give him the understanding of us and our ways so that he may join with us in our resolve, that he may become willing to sacrifice himself if necessary, in your bidding. We are thankful to you for providing this chance to hear, now, our beloved Sister Elena Marie speak your words from her heart. We are together, Lord. We are all as one. We are all united together in your holy cause. Amen."
