The Fool's Run

credit reports said he was a millionaire in his own right. There was a note that said he collected Japanese netsukes.
     
    I READ BOBBY’S Anshiser material and reread Dillon’s Whitemark report, sitting in a comfortable leather chair with a light over my shoulder, my feet on a hassock, looking out over the river in the darkness. I needed to think. It might be impossible to slow down Whitemark without attracting an awful lot of attention from the wrong kind of people. But the money . . .
    I spent the rest of the week painting, fishing on the St. Croix River, and working out at the dojo. I read Dillon’s report so often that I could recite it by heart. LuEllen called twice with questions, Dace twice more. They were ready to sign up.
    At eight o’clock in the morning, six days after the flight to Chicago, I walked up the hill to the dojo. The first classes were at noon, but the sensei did office work in the morning. He came to the outer door when I knocked, raised his eyebrows when he saw who it was, and let me in without a word. I spent two hours on the vacant hardwood floor, working on a formal exercise called a kata. I know twenty of them, more or less. I had been working on this one, sochin, for six months.
    A kata can really cool out the mind. When you do a kata right, the surface of the brain, the intellectual stuff, turns off. The action is all down in the lizard part, where reflexes and instincts are paramount.
    The Anshiser job was intriguing. The money was a big factor, no denying it. It would buy a certain kind of freedom, a powerfully attractive freedom. But that wasn’t the only motivating factor of the proposition.
    Beyond the money was the game. This was a big target, with heavy players. Could I take Whitemark out? I didn’t know. Maybe. If I won, I took a major prize. If I lost, it might be prison. Interesting stakes.
    To tell the truth, I didn’t much care what happened to Whitemark, any more than I’d been impressed with Anshiser’s talk of people losing their jobs if Whitemark won the competition.
    I had spent one and two-thirds military tours in Vietnam. I could remember running down a game trail on the border between South Vietnam and Laos. Two Hmong were up ahead of me, one of them, with a stomach wound, riding his buddy’s back. An NVA hunter-killer team was on our ass, and I was screaming for help on the radio. The radio kept cutting out. I thought it might be the tape antenna I had twisted down my pack straps, but I was not inclined to stop and unfold the whip and try that one. The NVA team was too close and the whip rattles through the overhead when you run.
    Because trees and ground contour and everything else can affect radio transmissions, I’d stop at high points and clearings to call. And since they were high points and clearings, I’d drop down on my belly to do it and the radio’s transmitter would cut out. The radio worked earlier in the run, and I could receive. The choppers were calling, “Say again, Echo, say again” but everything I transmitted was broken up and unintelligible.
    Things were looking so bad that I started calling on the run, and I found that, as long as I was bolt upright, the radio worked. It didn’t make sense. With the NVAs maybe a half mile back, we climbed a small knoll beside a burned-out village, popped some smoke, and got a pickup. When the chopper was away, and a few minutes after the Hmong died of his stomach wounds, I pried the back off the radio with a knife and looked inside.
    Spare change. The asshole who did the final assembly left two dimes and a penny inside the protective box. Every time I went down, the penny skidded out on an electronics board and shorted it out. When I stood up, the penny fell into the bottom of the box, and the radio worked.
    There are more stories like that, hundreds of them. Everybody in ’Nam had a story about the stuff we worked with, and the stuff we ate. The gear that rotted, the mortar rounds that fell short, the early M16s that jammed in firefights, the C-rations that included four cans of limas and ham and nothing else but a pack of Lucky Strike Greens, which had been manufactured in World War II. . . .
    When I saw that loose change rattling around in the radio, I decided the whole damn defense industry could take a flying leap. I haven’t changed my mind.
    All this cooked down in the lizard brain while I worked through the kata, through the difficult stances, the slow pressing moves, and the