The phone disappeared from Remo’s hands. “Emperor,” Chiun asked, “when you say all electronic devices. would stop working, would this include iBloggers?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Yes, Master Chiun, all iBloggers,” Mark Howard explained.
“Could one take steps to have his iBlogger shielded in special ways to protect it?”
“Perhaps, but we can discuss it later,” Howard said. “What we don’t understand yet is the reason for the kidnappings.”
“When is this EMC blast scheduled?” Chiun demanded. “Will it be tonight?”
“Give me that,” Remo said, removing the phone from Chiun’s hand.
“Remo!”
“Listen, Chiun, there’s not going to be an EMC blast tonight, probably never, and even if there was and even if you managed to get some special shielding so your iBlogger would still work, it wouldn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because every other iBlogger would be fried! Computers and toasters and every other damn thing with a computer chip inside of it, which is everything, would be dead.
“So there would be no more blogs for me to read,” Chiun said with somber understanding.
“Yeah. But like I said, it’s probably not going to happen”
“What of television?”
“Televisions would all stop working, too,” Remo said. “Right?” he asked into the phone.
“Well, if you happened to have one without microchips in it, then it would still work,” Mark Howard explained. “You know, the old tube sets?”
“Where does one purchase old tube sets?” Chiun demanded.
“It doesn’t matter, Chiun,” Remo said, getting exasperated. “You’d have the same problem. Even if you had a TV that worked, there’d be nothing to watch because every TV station would have technical difficulties for eternity.”
Chiun sat back in his car seat, eyes full of dread.
“Can we get on with this?” Dr. Smith asked.
“Get on with it,” Remo said. “What’s with the kidnappings?”
“The staff of the AFCA station was taken, but that’s just the start,” Smith said. “Ninety-three human beings were taken.”
“And I know why, Smitty,” Remo said morosely. “They’re food. The cave guys are rounding up cattle.”
“I think not,” Smith said. “The albinos came to the surface with very specific targets. In Topeka they raided the offices of a dentist who happened to live in rooms above his practice. They took every piece of equipment they could carry and they took the dentist, as well. In Apache Flats, Missouri, they targeted a car dealership with twenty-four-hour service. They stripped it of portable tools and took the mechanic who was on duty.”
“Just like in the bunker,” Remo observed. “The hardware and the people to work the hardware. What are they trying to do, set up their own full-service civilization down there?”
“Remo,” Smith said, “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.”
Gerhard’s Grunts were the meanest bastards you were ever gonna meet. It wasn’t a boast. It was just reality, and you might as well deal with it because you never wanted to call one of Gerhard’s Grunts a liar.
The grunts were in Afghanistan. They were in the second Iraq war, too, but as Gerhard himself would tell you, “That was a tea party compared to fucking Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan was deadly. Afghanistan was fucking hell. Maybe not for those pretty-boy Marines. They never saw any serious combat. Not for the Rangers or the SEALs. They spent that fucking war with their pinkies up their noses to the second knuckle. You wanna know about Afghanistan, you talk to the grunts..
When the spooks thought Osama was running around the lawless mountains, they sent in the grunts. When the Pentagon was certain Osama was hiding in the no-man’s-land on the untouchable side of the Pakistani border, they sent in the grunts. When the bombing was called off and they needed somebody to penetrate the unstable, miserable catacombs of the mountains, filled with decaying bodies and survivors who had fed on nothing more than their hatred of Americans for weeks, they sent in the grunts.
It was the catacombs where Gerhard’s Grunts made their reputation. They went into those rat holes and met with some of the fiercest resistance of the war. There were Taliban freaks who would leap onto them from ceiling perches and attempt to chew the grunts’ throats open. There were al-Qaeda toads who would sneak up on them and try to blow themselves up close to the grunts. Even if they couldn’t kill a grunt, they saw it as a success if they gave their life simply to blind or maim one of the hated Americans.
The grunts started coming out of the Afghan caves on stretchers. The wounded man would be latched on to an ambulance chopper basket, then the rest of his buddies would go back into the caves. The grunts began to refer to their cave, whatever cave they happened to be in, by one of the cruder four-letter words for a woman’s private parts. “And we’re the pricks you’ve been waiting for, so like it or not, it’s time to fuck.”
