Remo got the captain to a pair of steel doors at the entrance to the large concrete building. With his free hand, Remo knocked. A slot opened and two brown eyes peered out.
"I'm under arrest," said Remo.
"I don't see the captain's face. Maybe you have a gun in his chest. How do I know you don't have a gun in his chest?"
"I give you my word I do not have a gun in his chest."
"Colonel Mactrug said, 'A man's promise is only a puff of air. If it came from the other end, it would be called a fart.' "
"I give you my solemn word," said Remo. "Have you ever heard of a solemn fart?"
"Let me see you put your hands over your head."
"Open the door first."
"Colonel Mactrug says when you have the gun, you give the orders."
"Come on," Remo said. "It's getting late."
"Hands over the head."
Remo dropped the captain and put his hands over his head. The door opened. A gun poked out, followed
21
by a little fellow with his hands on the trigger of an automatic rifle.
The little fellow put the gun barrel into Remo's belly, then glanced at what was lying in the dust before the headquarters of Colonel Mactrug—one dead captain belonging to Colonel Mactrug. The little fellow squeezed the trigger of his M-16. He kept squeezing as his hand went sailing into the dust next to the captain and the gun remained as quiet as a daffodil.
The little fellow went backwards into the headquarters. He went very fast until he hit a wall, shattering his spinal colunn and ribs and loosening most of his major joints.
And then, Remo was inside, and there was Colonel Mactrug himself, kilts, black beret, and silver eagles glorious on both shoulder boards.
His face was red but his grin was confident.
"That doorway is salted with enough dynamite to make you into shredded wheat. Move and you get blown up. You can move fast, but you can't move across a room faster than my finger."
"Dynamite? Oh, no. My senses," gasped Remo. And the thin body with the thick wrists collapsed on the floor. The mouth opened, and Remo's eyes rolled back in his head, which had hit the floor hard. There was no movement in the body.
Colonel Mactrug, who had been preparing for just such an attack some day, cautiously removed his finger from the switch that would set off the dynamite.
To finish the intruder off, he selected a fine .357 Magnum from a small case set up in front of him on the platform he had erected for just such an occasion. He chose special steel-tipped bullets. But before he left the platform, he put a sighting scope on a tripod, aimed it at the chest of the intruder who had collapsed, and turned on the mini-computer attached to the sighting device. It looked like an ordinary gun scope, but it was the latest device of the U.S. Army. It could detect movement, the slightest movement, a boon to snipers
22
at night. If the intruder's heart even fluttered, it would register on the scope.
Colonel Mactrug could tell from the scope's digital readout even the extent of unconsciousness in a man. He loaded the .357 Magnum, then took a last glance at the scope. The numbers read 0-0-0.
It couldn't be. He could see through the open door the captain of the guard lying in the dust with a hole in his chest. He sighted on that body, careful to keep the gun ready. The dead captain read 0-0-0.
Colonel Mactrug put his hand in front of the scope and read. It registered 75.8. Movement. And life.
He aimed again at the intruder. The scope dropped instantly to read 0-0-0.
The intruder had died from just the knowledge that dynamite was present, and Mactrug was astonished. He had watched the intruder from the outset. He had seen the death blow delivered at the gate, a stunning move so fast that it was over before it was noticed. He had seen the kill of his personal guard at the entrance to his command post.
Perhaps the man's senses were developed to such a high degree that the force field of the wiring of the dynamite could actually kill him. Why not? Maybe. Certainly, he didn't move like anyone Colonel Mactrng had seen, and as Mactrug had often told his students, "I have seen it all. And I am willing to sell you some."
The man was dead. Colonel Mactrug put away the .357 Magnum. He would use a knife. Everyone would see the two men who had failed to stop the intruder, even with guns, and he, Colonel Mactrug, would be known as the one who stopped the intruder with a pocket knife. Yes. He would tell them it was a duel. He would tell them his own students had made crucial mistakes that led to their deaths, mistakes that they never would have made if they had but listened to their colonel. But Mactrug had made no such mistakes, and that was why the intruder had died in the knife duel.
Perhaps the colonel would describe how he had seen the man kill and had noticed a telltale giveaway. The
23
colonel could see that one could slip a pocket knife beneath his ear and draw in down to the carotid artery. Yes. That would be it.
He would say that the man was a special sort of Ninja killer that he had encountered in Malaysia. Yes, Malaysia. The Vietnam sorties were beginning to bore his students. And he could no longer tell his Latin American jokes about greasers because so many of his students were now Cubans.
Right. Ninja killers from Malaysia. And he, Colonel Mactrug, would show them how to combat such an evil force. For $7,800 per special course—special knives, of course, additional.
Yet, Colonel Mactrug had killed men, almost a hundred of them personally, and he knew enough to remain cautious, so with great care and another pistol just in case, he stealthily approached what had to be a corpse. He put the pistol next to an earlobe. With the other hand, he brought the pocket knife's blade to the intruder's right ear, reminding himself that the thrust always required more effort than it appeared to need. He prepared to cut throat, when suddenly he had an awful thought. If this man moved so differently from any he had ever seen—what if ... just what if he could stop his heart also? What if he had at his command the ability of Indian fakirs to control their body's inner workings?
And then the man's eyes suddenly were looking at him, and there was a smile on the man's face, and the man said, "Hi."
Shit, thought Colonel Mactrug.
He did not have another thought.
To have thoughts, one needed an operating brain.
And brains, like hearts, did not work with human hands inside them.
Remo wiped his hands clean and left the command headquarters and walked across the parade ground and waved to the machine gunners, who seemed startled at first and then waved back.
"You said a minute and a half," said the driver. 24
"Up to four, I said," Remo said.
"Yeah? Well, it's closer to five," said the driver. "What happened in there?"
"They wouldn't take me as a student," said Remo.
"Why not?"
"Not vicious enough, I think," Remo said.
And he looked at the mountains on the way back to Denver, where he made the driver let him off at a pay phone.
There he got a piece of paper from his rear pocket and read the numbers. What he would do now was report that the mission had been accomplished.
Upstairs had simplified the reporting process so that nothing could go wrong. One number was for mission accomplished. The other was for mission delayed.
It was a foolproof plan. Remo stared at the two numbers. He had written them down carefully when he was given the assignment. He had left a large space between the numbers so they would not run together. So he could, as now, tell where one started and where the other left off. One was at the very top of the page, the other at the bottom.
To make things even safer, he had marked a special squiggle next to one of the numbers.
Unfortunately, he was not altogether sure whether the squiggle marked success or failure. He tried to remember what he had been thinking about when he got the assignment and took down the numbers. What he had been thinking about was how little he cared about the assignment
. It had been over a decade now since he had been recruited in that unique way so that he would no longer exist, forthe organization that did not exist. CURE. It had been designed to give a struggling nation a chance to survive, but it worked so far outside the law that if it were ever discovered to exist, the nation would go under.
So CURE had been limited to a single assassin, so that no great number of operatives would have a chance to give them away.
But what CURE never understood was the special 25
nature of the training that Remo had undergone. It had come from the latest Master in an ages-old house of assassins from the little village of Sinanju on the North Korea Bay, and it had changed Remo Williams into something more than just a man. Sinanju had become an end in itself to him, as important to him as were the assignments he got from upstairs. He did the assignments because he loved his country still, but he thought very little of upstairs because they demanded from him only such a small fraction of his abilities.
Remo walked into the telephone booth. He dialed the top number. He was sure that the squiggle was some kind of an 5, which would mean success.
A flat voice answered, which he knew was a computer. There was only one person that he dealt with at CURE, and the acid voice of Harold W. Smith, director of CURE, was not the one coming over the phone with the single word: "Speak."
"Uhhh, everything is fine," said Remo.
"Please detail what went wrong," came the metallic voice.
"Oh," said Remo.
"Please hst," said the voice.
"Nothing went wrong," said Remo, realizing that he was now arguing with a computer. This did not bother him that much this morning on the Denver sidewalk. He usually found that most people weren't any more reasonable or flexible than computers were.
"Is that all that went wrong?" the computer asked.
"Nothing went wrong," Remo said.
"Anything else that is wrong?"
"Nothing went wrong," said Remo. He wondered if he could outlast a computer.
"You are not reporting properly. . . ." And then there was a click on the phone.
"Remo, what went wrong?" This voice was tight, bitter, and acid.
"Oh, hiya, Smitty. I just called the wrong number."
"Then everything went well?"
"Did you think it wouldn't?" 26
"I have to come up with something better for these telephones," Smith said. "We just have trouble communicating."
"Here's the best way," Remo said. "Don't you call me. And I won't call you."
Smith cleared his throat. "Anyway, I'm glad I've got you. We must make contact immediately."
"I just worked this morning," Remo said.
"Even on this phone line, I cannot talk."
"Everything is hush-hush," Remo said. "And everything is secret. I hate all this secret crap."
"This is the most dangerous thing ever to happen to the industrialized world," Smith said.
"Okay, so get to me in a month or so, will you?"
"A month or so may be too late," Smith said.
"Too late. Everything is always too late. Or too early, or too dangerous, but nothing really ever changes. Nothing."
"Remo, this is the most desperate situation we have ever encountered. We must make contact."
"I don't know your damned codes. You give me a code to meet you in Washington and I wind up in Texas. I can't put up with this crap anymore," Remo said.
"Just give me your hotel. Fast. And we'll get off the line."
"Skyview Hilton, room 105."
The line went dead, and Remo walked the Denver streets to the hotel and room 105.
It was a suite, and from one of the rooms came the voice of an announcer promising a rebate if you bought his gasoline, followed by a news break about how Arab armies were massing on the borders of Israel and Ga-mal Abdel Nasser promising screaming mobs that they were about to push Israel into the sea.
This was followed by another commercial for a $2,-500 car. Remo could almost recite the commercials and the programs they went with by heart. He must have heard each of them fifty times in the past ten years.
27
It would only be five more minutes anyhow. When he heard the show end, Remo opened the door slowly. A frail figure in a yellow kimono sat before the flickering television; a video recorder was next to the TV.
He turned. The face was parchment-frail, the beard and hah* wispy around the yellow face. There were tears in the hazel Oriental eyes.
"That was entertainment," said Chiun. "That dealt in beauty."
"You've heard about Dr. Lawrence Walters not telling Cathy Dunstable about her real father two dozen times at least. How can you be moved by it?" Remo asked.
"Beauty is beauty. And you people must destroy everything that is fine and decent."
"Me? I haven't touched your soap operas." "Whites did it," said Chiun. "Yes," Remo said agreeably. "You're white." "All day," said Remo.
"Violence. Nothing but violence," said Chiun, Master of Sinanju, and the mentor who had given Remo the genius of Sinanju, not as a pupil but as a son, not because he liked Remo but because Remo was the vessel who could hold the river of the teachings of Sinanju. It had been both a joy and a surprise to Chiun, Remo realized, to find that a white man could absorb Sinanju, which was the sun source of all the martial arts, the center, of which karate, tae kwan do, ninja, and all the others were just weak shadows.
"If you don't like the sex and violence hi the new soap operas, don't watch them. Just don't go blaming them on me."
"I do not watch them," Chiun said. "So what have I done, then? Why are you on the snot?"
"You never watched the great dramas when they were good. And why? Because I can try to teach you some things but beauty you will never know." "Smitty is coming here," said Remo.
28 _. '
"Never know," said Chiun. "Because you are white. 1 knew this when I assumed the burden of your teaching through the generousness that was in me."
"You started teaching me because upstairs filled a submarine with gold and sent it to your village. You didn't expect to do anything but teach a couple of blows and then leave with the gold."
"Through the generousness that was in me. Yes. I knew you were white, Remo, but what I did not understand, could not understand, was how white."
"I didn't have anything to do with making your damned soap operas sexy or violent," Remo said.
"And yet, seeing how helpless you were, I gave years, when days would have been enough."
"Nobody hi Sinanju, Little Father. No Korean could take Sinanju. You stayed because I could do it. A white man did it. Me. White," said Remo.
"The best years of my life."
"White," said Remo.
"Very white," said Chiun.
"Smith is coming today, maybe tonight. He says something is urgent."
"A white of whites," said Chiun. "You're all white. White in your souls."
"All right, all right, all right," said Remo. "That's a bit much for just one rerun of a show that has gone off the air. What's biting you?"
"Wrong? Nothing is wrong with me. It is what is wrong with your country and your race," said Chiun, and withdrew a letter from his kimono.
"Should I read it?" asked Remo.
"If the pain is not too much."
The letter was from one of the television producers. It was addressed to a Mr. Chiun at a post office box he had set up in New Jersey. Chiun was always getting mail at the box, and Remo never quite understood who would be writing to him. He had assumed it was Chiun's way of collecting junk mail, which the master assassin liked to read because it always had so many pretty photographs, as opposed to personal letters,
29
which were just composed of groups of Western alphabet letters.
Remo read the letter.
"Dear Mr. Chiun! Thank you very much for considering Vermiform Studios for your daytime drama, 'Woes of the Master of Sinanju.' We feel, however, at this time, the television marke
t is not suitable for a romantic drama about a wise, noble, decent, handsome, and forgiving Korean assassin who is not appreciated by his white pupil. While we agree that much on television today suffers from too much violence, we do not see how taking a man's head off with a single hand blow is a form of decency and righteousness. Also, the American audience for dramas broadcast in Korean is just not that large. Yours truly, Avery Schwartz."
"You were going to show Sinanju on television?" asked Remo.
"No. I was going to show what truly professional assassins could do so that when people understood what a professional assassin could do, they would not use amateurs, who go running around the world creating chaos. That is real violence."
"Nobody would understand Sinanju. They just wouldn't, Little Father."
"What is so hard to understand? It is simply the essence that turns on itself. I simplified it in my script. For the white mind," Chiun said proudly.
"They still wouldn't understand it," Remo said.
"We will try it on Smith tonight." Chiun turned toward the window. "Remo, we have to leave this city. I hate this place."
"Why?"
"Because Cheeta Ching is not on television delivering the latest stupid happenings in your country."
"They call it the news," Remo said.
"Yes. And Cheeta Ching is not to be seen here. Instead, they have fat white men. Some of them have pimples. They read the news."
"Cheeta Ching is on television in New York. And 30
she's got a face like a barracuda and a voice like ice cracking. How can you stand her?"
"Silence. She is not to be seen in this awful city. And they have the same disgusting daytime dramas that you see everywhere else in this white country. If it weren't for my tapes, I would perish from lack of beauty. Do you think Smith knows someone in a television studio who will buy my script for a drama?"
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