"The fiends!" Chiun shrieked.
"What fiends?" asked Smith.
"The terrible Depublicans. They have spent this mighty nation into the poorhouse. All is lost. Your empire crumbles even as we speak. It is the fall of Rome all over again."
"Master Chiun, I have a proposition for you," said Smith.
"What proposition could interest a Master of Sinanju that does not include gold?" Chiun asked suspiciously.
"This one does include gold."
"Speak!"
"Find the submarine. Return it and its crew, and the gold is yours."
"I cannot. It involves service without a valid contract or payment."
"You do not understand. I am telling you that if you recover the submarine, the gold is yours free and clear. Without obligation."
Chiun's eyes narrowed. "No further service will be required?"
"No. And once the mission is successful, we will negotiate another year's service."
"But you have no money, Smith. You admit this."
"A temporary situation. Once it is resolved, another shipment of gold will be made."
Chiun had been stroking his beard in agitation. He stopped. His beard trembled. His whole head trembled.
"Double the gold?" he whispered.
"Exactly."
Chiun clamped a hand over the telephone mouthpiece. "Remo, did you hear? Smith has offered to double the gold!"
"That's not what he said. He's suckering you into recovering the gold for nothing."
"But I get to keep the gold."
"No skin off Smith's nose. He considers the gold lost. He can't lose. If you find the sub, he gets what he wants. If you don't, you've wasted your time for a promise."
"And if Smith does not recover this foolish submarine of his, there may be no more gold. Ever."
"Like I care," said Remo, face intent on the TV screen.
The hand came away from the mouthpiece, and Chiun said, "It is a bargain, Emperor Smith. Instruct me."
"The North Korean angle is the only lead we have. Go there. Learn what you can. And whatever you do, please do not embroil the U.S. in a war with North Korea."
"I will serve you well, Smith. For this may be the last time Sinanju will be honored to serve the modern Rome."
Chiun hung up, dancing. "Did you hear? A year's worth of gold, all mine for a day's service. Perhaps two."
"If you find the submarine."
"How large is a submarine?"
"Maybe three hundred feet long and forty high."
"How difficult can it be to find something that large and ugly?"
"If it's in your attic, none. If it's at the bottom of the Pacific, you could spend the next ten years of your life trying to earn a year's supply of gold."
"You are trying to ruin my triumph."
"Don't count your ingots."
Eyes squeezing to suspicious slits, the Master of Sinanju approached the TV screen that had so mesmerized his pupil. "Why is that woman talking to her glove?" he demanded.
"It's not a glove. It's a hand puppet. See? It talks back."
"And this amuses you, indolent one?"
"So sue me. I used to watch this show back at the orphanage. It's a good memory."
"I am going to pack. You should pack, too."
"Not me. I'm taking off after lunch."
"To where?"
"Nowhere."
"A suitable destination for a rootless American. But I need you."
"I don't work for Smith."
"And neither do I. I am working for me. As are you."
"Who says?"
"Did you not hear? Smith is broke."
"So?"
"Your credit cards are no longer good."
"I have money."
"Enough to carry you to nowhere?"
"There are six hundred bucks in my account last I looked. And another two in the cookie jar for emergencies."
"Spent."
Remo looked away from the screen. "On what?"
"The illustrious paperboy. He required a tip."
"You tipped the paperboy two hundred dollars!"
"Since he was worthy and it was not my money, it seemed equitable," Chiun said, shrugging. "And six hundred dollars will get you an excellent room-for One, perhaps two months. But what will you do after that?"
"I'll think of something."
"Perhaps once you find your roots, you may also find it in a beautiful orchard in which to dwell with the other trees."
"Not funny, Chiun." Frowning, Remo asked, "Look, if I come, how much of the gold is mine?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On how useful you are to me."
"Not good enough."
"One third. And I will prevail upon Smith to locate your forebears, who no doubt even now are hanging their heads in shame over your naked display of greed and graceless ingratitude."
Remo considered, "Okay. Done."
"Quickly. Before my gold rusts," said Chiun, fleeing the room.
"Does gold rust?" Remo asked himself. He decided to watch "Lamb Chop's Play Along" to the end and then pack. It made him feel better than he had in a long time.
JUST AS NATURE abhorred a vacuum, Harold W Smith despised coincidence. There was no place for such untidiness in the logical order of his world.
Yet coincidences happened, and Smith understood that. He did not accept coincidence without begrudging its very existence, but he understood that such puzzling phenomena manifested themselves from time to time, annoying as they could be.
In the world in which Harold Smith lived there was a phenomenon called cluster effect. The clumping of synchronous events or coincidences, producing a pattern that might suggest meaning or fate or even the guiding hand of an almighty God.
The cluster effect in which Harold Smith found himself trapped and drowning suggested just such an invisible hand.
In less than a week, he had lost his enforcement arm to an impossible computer failure, the Master of Sinanju's services to a mysterious submarine hijacking, CURE's operating funds to a bank failure and his all-important dedicated line to the President of the United States through a circumstance still unknown.
It was possible for any of these calamities to occur under extraordinary circumstances. Remo had resigned in the past, always to come back. Disagreements with the Master of Sinanju were worrisomely frequent and avoided only by nimble thinking. And it was certainly possible for the gold-bearing submarine to be intercepted by an overzealous North Korean gunboat. It had happened once before.
But a computer malfunction as inexplicable as the one that had resulted in the death of Roger Sherman Coe was flatly impossible, even if caused by a data transmission glitch or software virus. It was no glitch. No accident. Therefore it was the deliberate act of a conscious mind.
There was no escaping that, none whatsoever. And for a mind to go to the effort to trick Harold Smith into ordering the death of an innocent man, it would have to have a purpose.
The result had been to render CURE virtually powerless. Had that been the intent?
By itself, Smith would have dismissed the thought as patently ridiculous. Knowledge of the very existence of CURE was limited to Smith himself, Remo, Chiun and the current President. All previous Presidents, upon surrendering the office, were secretly visited by Remo and Chiun, their specific memories of CURE erased by a Sinanju technique Smith never understood but trusted implicitly.
No one outside the closed circle knew that CURE existed. Yet someone was attacking it. Attacking it at every seemingly vulnerable point.
It was a masterful strategy, Smith was forced to admit. It was elaborate. It was thorough. It showed the working of a brilliant mind with an almost omniscient awareness of CURE operations, from its secret financial conduits to the schedule of the gold shipment to Sinanju, to Remo's specific psychological vulnerabilities.
All of which were stored on the CURE computer-a system that was exhaustively scanned for viruses, electronic eavesdroppers and ut
terly Tempest shielded.
Somehow someone had entered the CURE system through a back door. There was no other way any of this could have happened.
But there were no back doors to the Folcroft Four, Smith knew for a fact. He had set up the system himself. The new XL SysCorp WORM drives were another matter. They could have been designed with trapdoors.
But why?
Smith was confident of one thing. The system had come to him through his own efforts. He had answered a classified advertisement in a disreputable computer magazine and initiated every contact. Buzz Kuttner was not out there twiddling his thumbs waiting for a call from Harold W Smith just so he could sell Smith a computerized Trojan horse.
If the Trojan horse were not waiting for him, it meant that it might not be the only Trojan horse. Smith turned in his seat to stare out at the sound. He was not used to this, not used to thinking through a CURE problem without the give-and-take data exchange of the Folcroft Four. But he was making progress-surprising progress without the distraction of his monitor.
Steepling his long fingers, Smith rested his pointed chin on them. Yes, it was becoming clear, as clear as Occam's razor, which suggested that the simplest theory was closest to the actual reality. Namely, that there was a mind out there that knew of CURE. Whether it knew of CURE before or after Smith had installed the WORM drives did not matter now. The mind had penetrated his system through a trapdoor, learned all CURE's secrets and exploited them masterfully.
There was only one flaw in the plan. It was a simple oversight. This supermind had broken the chain of CURE command at its strongest points. It was a unique strategy. One usually broke the weakest link to snap a chain.
The weak link was Harold Smith, an aging deskbound bureaucrat operating out of an installation whose very secrecy precluded security arrangements for his personal safety that were routinely extended to the heads of the FBI, CIA and other law-enforcement agencies.
A determined foe could simply walk into Harold Smith's office to kill him with a thirteen-cent bullet. Or ambush him on the lonely drive home.
There were many ways that Harold Smith could be liquidated, and CURE shattered.
The supermind had not elected to do that. It made no sense.
And because it had failed to do the intelligent thing, Harold Smith still lived.
It would prove to be a fatal mistake for the unseen foe Harold Smith was now certain existed out therein cyberspace.
Chapter 15
It was the worst duty of the Cold War and, even with the Cold War over, it had not changed one iota.
The Bridge of No Return was a narrow structure of green-painted wood that spanned an ideological chasm called the Thirty-eighth Parallel just north of the town of Panmunjom on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
No peace treaty marked the end of the Korean conflict back in 1953, only a cessation of hostilities and a semi-permanent cease-fire. For forty years more than a million soldiers eyeballed one another across a three-mile strip of minefields and razor-wire nests set against the misty green hills of the ill-named Land of Peaceful Cahn.
It was on this spot that, after the Korean War armistice, Korean POWs from both side were presented with the heart-rending choice; north or south. Some were forced to choose between family and freedom in the newly divided land.
Here United Nations troops kept an uneasy watch. Border conflicts were few but often bloody. North Korean infiltrators often crept down dressed as raggedy farmers. Every few years the blue helmets discovered a tunnel linking the north and the south and would have to demolish it.
And Sergeant Mark Murdock, US. Army, had actually volunteered for Panmunjom.
Most of the time, it was not so bad. The UN blue helmets handled the donkey work. US. forces were stationed here on observation duty.
Sometimes that duty involved sitting in the Truck. The Truck was a deuce and a half. It was not always the same deuce and a half. They rotated them every other day, and the engines had to be overhauled practically every month.
The Bridge of No Return was the chief choke point against a North Korean land invasion of the south. Barely wide enough for a Humvee to rattle across, it was practically an open door to the human-wave assaults that the North Koreans had used during the conflict so long ago.
That was where the Truck came in.
It was stationed with its ass end pointed at the southern terminus of the bridge, engine perpetually running, clutch depressed and gear set in reverse.
Today it was Sergeant Mark Murdock's turn to sit behind the always vibrating wheel.
There were spotters all around. A mixture of blue helmets and green. It was their job to warn the man in the Truck to slam that sucker into reverse and bottle up the bridge long enough to buy time to evacuate UN personnel or order up reinforcements.
Nobody knew which were the standing orders. Everybody knew that the man who was unlucky enough to be in the Truck when it backed up onto the bridge would probably die behind the wheel. The bridge was too narrow for the doors to open and let him out.
So Sergeant Mark Murdock sat in the cool of the late Korean summer, inhaling carbon monoxide and gritting his teeth against the constant thrum and vibration of the truck motor.
It was horrible duty. The monotony was broken only by the stink of gasoline as the fuel tank was replenished by hand. But as long as the truck stayed in place, Sergeant Mark Murdock figured he'd see Fort Worth again.
Still, he couldn't keep his eyes off the driver's-side mirror. He had heard the stories. How UN guards had gone out one day to trim a poplar tree and shrieking North Koreans had poured across the bridge with axes and clubs. No one ever figured out what set them off. But two American servicemen had died, only the scorched skeleton of the tree marking the spot.
And that was in the calm period after the Pueblo incident and before the Rudong I.
Ever since North Korea had tested the Rudong I-the nuclear-capable modified Scud missile that could hit Tokyo eight minutes after launch-the world had become very nervous about the north.
Patriot missile batteries had been rushed to the DMZ.
There was talk of bombing suspected North Korean nuclear installations before they got the bomb. Some said they had the bomb already.
Not much hard news came down from the north these days. Rumors, yeah. Every other day the scuttle-butt had it that there were food riots, mass executions and other evidences of a dying regime up there.
Now there was talk of a missing US. submarine that had strayed into Korean territorial waters and vanished.
Washington said that it had been captured. Pyongyang swore it knew nothing about any US. submarine. The accusations were flying thick and furious-and the veiled threats were losing their protective gauze.
And on either side of the bridge at Panmunjom, the two armies, technically still in a state of war, had been placed on the highest state of alert, waiting for the word.
So far, the word had been: stand down.
That could change at any moment, Sergeant Murdock knew. So he kept a weather eye on the driver's-side mirror, watching the shadows and imagining they sometimes moved.
He almost wet his pants when someone knocked on the driver's-side window and a distinctly American voice said, "Move the truck, pal."
There was a man standing there in the darkness. He was tall and looked American. But he wore some kind of black outfit that made Sergeant Murdock think of the Vietcong's black pajama uniforms.
"Shake a leg," the guy said, giving the glass another hard tap.
"What?"
"We gotta get across."
"You're defecting?"
"No, you are defective," a squeaky voice said from Murdock's right. He whirled.
Standing on the other side was a little yellow man, all in black. He was looking up at Sergeant Murdock with hard hazel eyes and a face that was a cobwebby mask. "I can't let you across the bridge," Murdock said.
"You would not need to if you idiots had
not destroyed my personal tunnel."
"Your personal-"
"Constructed with the cooperation of Pyongyang for the convenience of the Master of Sinanju, and destroyed by careless cretins."
"Move it or lose it, pal," said the white guy.
"I can't. I have my orders."
"Suit yourself," said the white guy, tapping the glass. This time he tapped once, gently, and the glass spiderwebbed and fell into the hollow of the door like candy glass.
A hand at the end of a thick wrist came into the cab, and Sergeant Murdock reached for his side arm.
He touched the butt of the revolver, scooting away from the driver's-side door and the reaching hand. Before he could clear the holster, the passenger door fell open and he fell with it. Right into the dirt.
A sandal stamped down like a punch press, and Sergeant Murdock found himself holding a useless twist of steel instead of an Army-issue Colt .45 automatic.
The old Korean leaped into the passenger's seat as the white claimed the driver's seat, and both doors slammed shut. The Truck slammed into reverse, tires spitting hard dirt into Sergeant Murdock's stunned face.
It rolled onto the Bridge of No Return, and kept going.
In the dark the UN blue helmets jumped to the wrong conclusion.
"Retreat! Retreat to defensive positions."
Only Sergeant Murdock knew it was a false alarm, but the way the UN troops were pulling back, firing as they ran, he had no choice but to pull back with them. That or be shot by his own people.
As he sought the safety of a UN bunker, he wondered about the white guy. He sounded as American as can be. What kind of American would defect to North Korea in this day and age?
COLONEL KYUNG CHO CHI saw the Truck approaching his control bunker in reverse.
He recognized it as an American deuce and a half, and since it was coming from the direction of the Bridge of No Return in reverse, he leaped to a logical conclusion.
It was the Truck, the one the Americans kept on standby in case Colonel Kyung received the order to storm the Bridge of No Return.
It was supposed to block the bridge, but it was clearly coming toward his fortified post. And it was alone.
"What kind of lunatic attack is this?" he muttered, dropping his field glasses from his narrowed eyes. "Shoot out the tires!" he yelled.
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