The Image and the Likeness Part 10

"Twelve hundred miles, more or less," said Baker. "You can make it by nine, maybe ten, tonight."

Kazu shook his head.

"No. Tonight I must rest, gather strength. We start two AM, arrive Kremlin at sunrise. We catch them same time they catch me. No warning whatever."

Kazu lay down on the swampy lake bottom while we huddled on the floor of the box, courting sleep which never came.

At one o'clock we at last gave it up, and Baker fired his pistol until Kazu stirred. While he was awakening we listened to the radio. Things had calmed down quite a bit, and as we pieced the various broadcasts together, an amazing realization came over us. Everyone believed that Kazu was dead! Evidently no word of our trip across all of central Asia had been received! Search planes, both Soviet and Chinese, were combing the eastern Gobi for the body.

Other news included a war declaration by China upon the Soviet Union, and the announcement that the Russian Politbureau had scheduled a meeting in the Kremlin to consider the emergency.

We pa.s.sed all of this on to Kazu, whose grim face relaxed for the first time in a fleeting grin.

"Good reporters. Know what are most savory items. Now guide me well, and away from towns until we reach it."

The trip across the Urals and the plains of European Russia retains a nightmare quality in my mind, comparable only with that first night on Yat. Even Baker, who plotted the course, can remember it little better.

Now and again we caught glimpses of the dim lights in farms, and once we saw the old moon reflected in the Volga. Much of the low country was covered with ground fog, which reached to Kazu's waist; this, combined with the blackout which had been ordered in every town, made observation by us or the Russians either way difficult. A few people saw Kazu, and their reports reflect a surrealist madness; those who had the horrifying experience of suddenly meeting Buddha in the early morning mists were universally incapable of making any coherent report to the authorities.

And then, just as the ghostly false dawn turned the night into a misty gray, we saw ahead the towers of Moscow. Now Kazu increased his speed.

Concealment was no longer possible; he must reach the Kremlin ahead of the warning.

At 500 miles per hour Buddha descended upon Moscow. His plunging feet reduced block after block of stores and apartment houses to dust, and the sky behind us was lighted more brightly by the fires he started than by the dull red of the still unrisen sun. Now at last I heard the tardy wail of a siren and saw armored cars darting through the streets. On the roof of an apartment house I glimpsed a crew trying to unlimber an antiaircraft gun, but Kazu saw it also, and smashed the building to rubble with a pa.s.sing kick.

And then we were at the Red Square. St. Basil's at one end, the fifty foot stone walls of the Kremlin along one side and Lenin's Tomb like a pile of red children's blocks. Kazu stood for a moment surveying this famous scene, his feet sunk to the ankle in a collapsed subway. It was my first view of the Red Square, and somehow I knew that it would be the last, for anyone. Then Kazu slowly walked to the Kremlin and looked down into it. I remember how suddenly absurd it all seemed. The Kremlin walls, the very symbol of the iron curtain, were scarcely six inches high! The whole thing was only a child's playpen.

But now Kazu had found what he wanted. Without bothering to lift his feet, he crushed through the walls, reached down and pulled the roof from one of the buildings. He uncovered a brightly lighted ant-hill.

Like a dollhouse exposed, he revealed rooms and corridors along which men were running. Kazu dropped to his knees and held our box up so that we might also see.

"Are these the men?" he asked. Baker replied in the negative.

Kazu abruptly pressed his hand into the building, crushing masonry and timbers and humans all into a heap of dust, and turned to a larger building. As he did, something about it seemed familiar to me. Yes, I had seen it before, in newsreels. It was--

But again Kazu's fingers were at work. Lifting at the eaves, he carefully took off the whole roof. Through a window we saw figures hurrying toward a covered bridge connecting this building with another.

At Baker's warning, Kazu demolished the bridge, and then gently began picking the structure to pieces. In a moment we saw what we were after.

A wall was pulled down, exposing a great room with oil paintings of Lenin and Stalin on the wall and a long conference table in the center.

And cl.u.s.tered between the table and the far wall were a score of men.

Anyone would have recognized them, for their faces had gone round the world in posters, magazines and newsreels. They were the men of the Politbureau. They were Red Russia's rulers.

There was an instant of silent mutual recognition, and then Kazu spoke to them. As befitting a G.o.d, he spoke in their own tongue. Exactly what he said I do not know, but after a little hesitation they came around the table to the precarious edge of the room where the outer wall had been. Kazu gave further directions and held up our steel box. Fearfully they came forward and jumped the gap into our door. One by one they made the leap, some dressed in the bemedalled uniforms of marshals, others in the semi-military tunics affected by civilian ministers. The last was the man who had succeeded Stalin on his death, and who had taken for himself the same name, as though it were a t.i.tle.

As he entered our room, we saw that he even looked like the first Stalin, clipped hair, moustache and all. He was a brilliant man, we knew. Brilliant and ruthless. He had grown up through the purges, in a world which knew no mercy, where only the fittest, by communist standards, survived. He had survived, because he was merciless and efficient and because he hated the free west with a hatred that was deadly and implacable.

I often wonder what his thoughts were at that moment. He came because he was ordered to and because he knew the alternative. He knew he was to die, but he obeyed because by so doing he could prolong life a little, and because there was always a chance.

At that moment I deeply regretted knowing no Russian. The twenty one who came in talked among themselves in short sentences. They saw us, but ignored us. Baker spoke, first in English and then in German. The one called Stalin understood the German, for he looked at Baker searchingly for a moment, and then turned away. Only one of them replied. This was Malik, the man who wrecked the old United Nations and then became Foreign Minister after Vishinsky was murdered. He ignored the German and spat out his reply in English.

"You will not live to gloat over us. He will kill you too, all of you!"

We can never be sure of what Kazu planned, because now--and of this I am certain--his plans changed. There was suddenly a stillness. We waited.

Then I ran to the window and looked upward into the great face.

It had changed. A deep weariness and a bewilderment was upon it--as though Kazu had suddenly sickened of destruction and slaughter. His whispering was the roaring of winds as he said, "No--no. This is not the way--not Buddha's way. They must talk. They must understand each other.

They must sit at tables and settle their differences, that is my mission."

Kazu took five steps. Below us was an airfield.

"Can you fly?" he asked us. Chamberlin had been an army pilot in the fifties. Kazu pushed the box up to a transport, an American DC8.

"Go in this," he said quite clearly. "Go in this plane until you are in Washington. Tell America about me. Tell America I am coming--that I am bringing--_them_. Tell America there must be--peace."

We scrambled out of the steel box, leaving the Russians in a miserable heap in one corner.

He arose to his full height and carefully adjusted the cables around his neck. I noticed that his fingers fumbled awkwardly, and that he staggered slightly. Then he spoke once more.

"I cannot cross Atlantic. Only route for Buddha is Siberia, Bering Straight, Alaska. But this not take long. You better hurry or I get to Washington first!"

He turned on his heel and walked a few steps to the end of the runway.

"Now get in plane. I give little help in takeoff!"

We climbed into the familiar interior of the big American transport. A moment later it arose silently, vertically like an elevator. Chamberlin, in the pilot's seat, hurriedly started the engines. He leaned from a window and waved his arm, and we shot forward and upward. For a moment the plane wavered and dipped, taking all of Walt's ability to recover.

Then with a powerful roar, the big DC8 zoomed over the flames of Moscow toward the west.

The flight to London and the Atlantic crossing seemed unreal.

We lived beside the radio. War and revolt against the Soviets had broken out everywhere. With the directing power in the Kremlin gone, the top-heavy Soviet bureaucracy was paralyzed. The Yugoslavs marched into the Ukraine, Chinese armies occupied Irkutsk and were pressing across Siberia. Internal revolution broke out at a hundred points once it was learned that Moscow was no more.

Eagerly we listened to every report for word of Kazu. At first there was nothing, and then a Chinese plane reported seeing him crossing the Ob River, near the Arctic Circle. They said that he carried a box in his hand and appeared to be talking to it. Then news from the tiny river settlement of Zhigansk on the Lena that he had pa.s.sed, but that he limped and staggered as he climbed the mountains beyond.

After that, silence.

Planes swarmed over eastern Siberia, the Arctic Coast and Alaska, but found nothing. Five hundred tons of C ration were rushed to Fairbanks, and tons of medical supplies for burns and possible illness were readied, but no patient appeared. At first we were hopeful, knowing Kazu's powers. Perhaps he had lost his way, without Baker and the maps, but surely he could not vanish. As the days pa.s.sed Baker became more worried.

"It's the radiation," he explained. "He took the full dose of gamma rays right in his back. He might go on for days, and then suddenly keel over.

He's had a bad burn outside, but it's nothing to what it did to him internally."

So the days pa.s.sed, and so gradually hope died. And then, at last, there was news. It came, belatedly, from an eskimo hunter on the Pribolof Islands, in Bering Sea. He reported that a great sea G.o.d had come out of the waters, so tall that his head vanished into the clouds. But, he was a sick G.o.d, for he could hardly stand, and soon crawled on his hands.

Around his neck, said the eskimo, he carried a charm, and he spoke words to this in a strange tongue. And the charm answered him in the same tongue, and with the voice of a man. And the two spoke to each other for a time and then the great one arose and walked off of the island and into the fog and the ocean.

Questioned, the man was somewhat vague as to the exact direction taken, although it seemed clear that Kazu had headed south. When Baker examined his chart of Bering Sea, he found that the ocean to the north and west, towards Siberia, was shallow--less than five hundred feet. But the Pribolofs stood on the edge of a great deep. Only twenty miles south of the islands, the ocean floor dropped off to more than ten thousand feet, for three hundred miles of icy fog shrouded ocean, before the bleak Aleutians arose out of the mists. This desolate area was searched for months by ships and planes, but no trace ever appeared from the treacherous currents of the stormy sea. Kazu had vanished.

So here ended the story of Kazu Takahashi, who was born in the days of the first bomb, and who died by the last ever to sear the world. He was believed by millions to be the incarnation of the Lord Buddha, but to four men he was known not as a G.o.d but as a great and good man.