An Old Fashioned War td-68

by Warren Murphy

  Since Granicus, even if he had not left the world early with the help of a Sinanju Master, would have been gone for almost two thousand years now, and since everyone who ever knew him would have been gone that long, and since anyone who knew the people who knew him would have been gone by centuries also, Remo Williams didn't bother to ask for directions but simply headed north.

  In a British control base, the stranger in the gray slacks and black T-shirt was being duly recorded. It was recorded that he entered the house containing the springs, read a scroll, and then asked the nearest person, who happened to be a plainclothesman like most everyone now in this area, where the old military road was.

  Constable Blake answered.

  "There was a road here used to store arms for D-Day, if that's what you mean, sir."

  The stranger, named Remo Williams if his passport was correct, answered:

  "No. Not that one. An older one."

  " 'Twas built on an old Norman road, sir," said Constable Blake.

  "Bit older. How many roads north do you have?"

  "Quite a few."

  "What's the oldest?"

  "I wouldn't rightly know, sir."

  The subject, Remo, was followed to the roads north. He looked at every one of them and walked around, a bit confused. He asked several passersby how long a stadium was, and was told by a young schoolgirl the exact distance.

  The schoolgirl also knew which was the old Roman road. She pointed out little white posts about a foot high along the side of the road. She told Remo:

  "These are Roman mileposts. They left them all over their empire. Any idiot knows that."

  "I'm an American," Remo said as Scotland Yard prepared to remove the girl from danger-if that were possible, considering the strange powers of this intruder.

  "Oh, I'm sorry. Just follow the white posts. Can you count?"

  "I can count. I just didn't know which was the old Roman road, that's all."

  "Yes, of course. That's all right. You really can't be expected to know all these things. Just follow the white posts."

  "Lots of people don't know Roman mileposts."

  "Yes. Many don't. If you get lost, ask for help from a bobby," said the little girl, age nine.

  "I can find it," said Remo, who could count the number of men watching him in surveillance, who could even sense the monitors on him sending signals back to their headquarters.

  "I'm sure you can," said the sweet little girl with the separate teeth, schoolbooks, freckles, braids, and all the other usual accoutrements of an English schoolchild. "Just don't walk in the middle of the road, sir. Cars are dangerous."

  Remo cleared his throat. "Cars are not dangerous. I'm dangerous."

  "Well of course you're dangerous. You're a very dangerous man," she said, humoring him the way children sometimes do with adults. "But please do stay on the side of the road."

  Remo saw a police van parked along the side of the road. It was the one containing the cameras watching him.

  He sauntered over to one headlight and unscrewed it. Along with the tires, the man at the wheel, the wheel, and finally with a great roaring rip, the roof. "Dangerous," said Remo.

  "Destructive," said the British schoolgirl.

  The Scotland Yard detectives poured out of the van without a roof.

  "Stay where you are. I'm going to get you your prime minister. Just don't crowd me."

  "Do stay near him," said the girl. "He can be violent, of course, but he does seem like a dear sort, don't you think?"

  "I'm not a dear sort," said Remo. "I'm an assassin. I kill people. I kill lots of people."

  "Well then, they must be nasty people, but do please stay on the side of the road, and do be careful whom you let offer you a ride."

  Remo shot the onlooking police a dirty glance. He could hear one of them say into a telphone: "Subject identified self as dangerous assassin." Remo blew a raspberry at the police, and one at the little girl, and counted his way up the old Roman road for as many white posts as the girl said.

  He knew the road had to be underneath him.

  That was how roads worked- They built new roads on top of old roads, and they just layered the pathways. Or wore them down as the case might be. It was the same thing they did with cities. They just kept piling the new city on top of the old one.

  Remo reached the correct milepost and looked around. To his right was a field of grain. To his left was a flock of sheep. Stone walls surrounded the road, and far off was a little cottage billowing smoke.

  There was no ruin of a mansion. Not a hint of an old Roman building. Nothing. British countryside and nothing.

  "He's stopped just where they left the Prime Minister's car. He's looking around," came a voice that was supposed not to carry as far as Remo could hear.

  "He's turning around now, looking back here, putting a finger over his mouth. By Jove, the man can hear me a half-mile away down the road."

  If Remo could not get quiet, he would have to make it around him. A thrush called at a distance, idling motors chugged far off, wind blew through the grain, and Remo inhaled, tasting first the odors of the earth, moisture, rich soil, old gasoline fumes, and then from skin to bone he became quiet in himself, selecting the sounds and noises and scents and closing them off one by one until he was in a silence of his body.

  He could taste the harsh macadam road through his shoes. There was stone under that road, deep and heavy stone. The earth was interrupted by it. A half-mile off was a little grassy hillock.

  Remo remembered Chiun pointing out an old building in Judea once. He said when buildings were in countrysides, if the site was not maintained, it would grow over. And if it grew over for more than a few centuries, the plants and earth would build a small hill around it. Only recently in modern times had archaeololgists learned to recognize these hills as tels, good digging sites for old cities and such.

  Remo walked over the stone wall and through the field of golden grain to the green hillock. He stood there and knew there was lots of stone underneath. He walked wherever he felt stone until he saw where the earth had been cut. Usually grass was hacked away, but this cut was done with something as smooth as a scalpel cutting a line the length of a coffin low in the hill. It was a patch, a patch of earth cut and replaced and now beginning to grow back.

  Remo dug into it with his hands and peeled it back. He heard the constables back at the road say he had found something. He saw loose dirt underneath. Someone had recently dug here, and it was easy to follow. It took him only a few minutes to reach the first minor stone baffle in the outer wall of the old home of Maximus Granicus, sent early to his reward by the hand of Sinanju.

  Hazel Thurston was tired of threatening that her captors would never get away with this. Besides, she didn't believe it anymore herself.

  They were going to get away with it. They had kidnapped her just outside Bath in the quintessentially British county of Avon, and they had gotten clean away with it. They hadn't left the country, and yet she was in a strange stoite room with earth piled up outside the windows.

  They had been here three days now, and the water was tepid, the food old, and as she suspected, the air was getting stale.

  "Do you think they buried us without air?" asked the intelligence aide.

  "Must be a big place if we could last until now."

  "Looks like we're lost, yes?" said the aide.

  "I'm afraid so."

  "What do you say we overpower the guard?"

  "Certainly. But what for? Where are we going to run?"

  "We can start digging."

  "We don't know, how much earth they piled up outside."

  "I can hear you," said the guard. He held a submachine gun loosely at his side.

  "Then you should know you're going to get nothing from me."

  "I wouldn't want anything from you, Hazel Thurston," said the guard. "You're an ugly old Brit bitch to begin with."

  "In victory or defeat, you people are just as disgusting as the day
your mothers foaled you," said the British Prime Minister. The aide shot her a look of caution.

  "What are you afraid of?" she asked. "That he won't like us?"

  "If I didn't like you, bitch, you'd have your eyes shot out."

  "I am sure that is the new form of government you wish to bring to Ireland. I don't know why people are surprised that when terrorist movements take over a country, they just use the police force the way they use you louts."

  The courageous woman's chest heaved. The air was getting very thin. The guard had a little plastic tube he sucked on every few minutes. He was getting fresh oxygen.

  "If I am going to pass out," said Hazel Thurston, "I do have a last word. Please get your leader here."

  "You can tell it to me."

  "I wouldn't leave my used tissues with you. Get your leader."

  Mr. Arieson arrived without one of those tubes that apparently supplied oxygen. He didn't seem to need air. He was fresh as sunshine.

  "You want to see me? You have a last word?"

  "Yes, I do. I feel myself on the verge of passing out. And I want you to be aware of my last sentiments."

  "I love last sentiments," said Mr. Arieson. "I love monuments to last sentiments. I love banners with last sentiments, and standards with last sentiments, and a statue with a last heroic sentiment absolutely makes me swoon."

  "God save the Queen, and God save England," said the Prime Minister, and was feeling a darkness envelop her when one of the walls caved in, sending a large block of stone smashing into the room as though it had been shot from a cannon.

  A man followed it inside. Blessed air filled the room. It became light. The terrorist with the submachine gun brought it to bear. He was a large man with thick forearms. The intruder, smaller and thinner, seemed to just slap at the forearms. But it sounded like thunder. The arms looked like jelly in the sleeves, and the submachine gun fell harmlessly to the ground.

  The man caved in the terrorist's head like an inflated paper bag.

  The intelligence man gasped. "I've never seen moves that fast or effective. Ever. That's not a man. I don't know what it is."

  "He's from an old house I know," said Arieson, who didn't bother to hide or duck.

  "You. I want you," said Remo.

  "Here I am,' said Arieson. "I obviously wanted you. And here you are. Don't you get the message yet."

  "I'm waiting."

  "Stay out of my way. "

  "You set things up for me to be here and you say I'm in your way."

  "You people are always in my way. I try to have a little fun, do my thing, and you always cause trouble. Sinanju are the biggest troublemakers of all time. Look here at this old unused house of Granicus Maximus, who by the way knew how to treat me, if you don't. You killed him before he had his civil war."

  "Who are you?" asked Hazel Thurston.

  "I'm someone who doesn't like to be interfered with," said Mr. Arieson.

  "I'm your rescuer," said Remo to the Prime Minister. "Or didn't you mean me?"

  "I meant both of you. Get out of my way, please."

  "Just a second," said Remo. "I'm going to try to kill this guy."

  "Be our guest, but please do let me out first." said the Prime Minister. She saw Scotland Yard types at the entrance to the room the thin stranger had made. She told them to wait.

  The thin stranger picked up a block of stone from the floor that must have weighed a ton. He did it in a gentle motion, and then the stone was chest-high and then it was flying through the air at Arieson. But the stranger was moving alongside it, as though waiting for Arieson to duck. He did not duck. He walked through the stone, and through the wall, calling out:

  "Salve gladiati."

  The stone shattered like shrapnel, wounding the Prime Minister lightly on her forearm and cutting a small gash in her aide's head. The thin stranger left a little less mysteriously. Whereas Arieson appeared to move through solid stone, the thin stranger moved through solid phalanx of Scotland Yard.

  He was lost by the police on the road back to Bath, but later the Prime Minister found out in a confidential phone call from America's President that the stranger was American and had been sent to rescue Prime Minister Thurston.

  "He seems to have amazing moves," said the Prime Minister. "But who is this Arieson and what terror group does he represent?"

  "We don't know yet."

  "Well, it certainly can function better than any of the hostiles before it."

  "That's what worries us," said the President. He did not tell his ally, but Harold W. Smith of CURE had set up a strategy room just for this phenomenon. It tracked all the methods of the new warfare and found that previously ineffective groups had suddenly developed not only a skill for warfare but also a desire for it, something that the military academies could only hope to instill. Something was making men want to go to war more than had ever been recorded in the insane history of the planet.

  Remo arrived back in Sinanju with Poo, and his puzzle. While he could do nothing with Arieson, he had a plan for Poo. He brought her to live in the big house on the hill, as was befitting the wife of a Master of Sinanju.

  There he asked Chiun to speak with her.

  "As an American I want my wife to be part of our business," said Remo.

  "Most foolish, like most things American."

  "Poo's got some good ideas about how to run the House of Sinanju."

  "Really?" said Chiun. He folded his long fingernails in his lap and his face was calm.

  "Yeah, she thinks we ought to formalize our relationship. You know, who gets what for what. Right now it goes into one big kitty. I don't keep track of it. But I'd like you to talk to her."

  Remo said this with a straight face. And with just as straight a face, Chiun said he would be delighted. He allowed Poo to make a place for herself on a mat before him. She served them tea. Chiun's was little more than warm water. Hers was harsh and black. Remo sat down between them with the countenance of an innocent.

  Poo began with praises for the Masters of Sinanju, and then began recounting tales of their wives. Remo had never heard these stories before.

  Poo seemed to know just from stories handed down what each wife got, and how she was treated. Chiun only nodded. He did not disagree with anything she said. When she was finished it was past midnight and the dank West Korea Bay was dark as a buried slate. "Are you done with your demands?" asked Chiun. "I am, dear father-in-law."

  "Then may I wish you luck with Remo, because he is the only one to negotiate, for it is his share that is yours, not mine. And as between Remo and me, we've already arranged things."

  "But what share does Remo get?"

  "Whatever share I say he gets. That is the tradition of Sinanju."

  Remo saw blood drain from the round face of Poo.

  "Look, sweetheart," he said, "if you feel tricked into this marriage, you can back out now."

  "No," she wailed. "No Master of Sinanju ever gets divorced."

  Chiun smiled, leaving Remo with Poo, who now wanted a better accounting of Remo's property than an American CPA. Just before he was out of sight, Chiun said:

  "The next time Mr. Arieson calls, and he will. I will go with you. And I'll show you how to handle him."

  Chapter 9

  "Does Chiun know him?"

  "I think so," said Remo. He was on the line with Smith in the baker's house. The baker's wife had a new dress from Harrods. As she prepared the evening dinner, she passed by Remo, making gestures. There would be a finger turned limply downward, and a contemptuous smile. There would be a noodle draped over a bowl and then a pointing to Remo. An old man would walk outside, stooped over, and she would nod to the old man while smiling to Remo, indicating the same performance could be expected from Remo.

  Remo ignored her. In all the world, he had never gotten so much disrespect as in Sinanju itself. Especially from Poo's family. He could probably change it, but that would require making love to Poo. He would sooner dip his body in braised chicken
liver with raw onions. He would rather swim nude through warm aspic. He would mount a vat of frozen marmalade first.

  These were the things he thought of precious Poo, and the more he thought them, the more he did not wish to make love to this woman, not once. Not quickly like a chipmunk. Not ever.

  It was not that Poo was fat. Weight on a nice woman could be attractive. Poo was at the core, if one could wade through to the core, a very un-nice person. She was like a magnet for every personality flaw of womankind.

  Three minutes in the King David Hotel and Poo had adopted the spending habits of a Great Neck, Long Island, matron.

  She came back from London like the worst of British royalty, thinking everyone around her had to be either condescended to or ignored.

  She wanted to become his business partner.

  And she used her mother like her own personal whip. Remo could feel for the baker, a truly harried man. In a society where women were supposed to be subservient, he was like a slave.

  The fact was, for some reason the attitude of even the nicer Sinanju women was that a man was only good for what he could do for her. Remo had never heard really kind words from Chiun about his wife, other than that he had managed to live with her. But then the Masters of Sinanju had something else. They had Sinanju. That was more than a wife or a mistress: it was the one permanent relationship a Master would have. Everything else passed.

  There was a closeness Remo, born in Newark in America, had with Chiun and every other Master for millennia that transcended anything humans shared with each other. It was a knowing. It was a being. Even if he and Chiun were at diametrically opposite positions on any matter, they were, after all, the same. More the same than twins. So as Remo tried to explain to Smith what the situation was, in a way he couldn't.

  "He recognized Arieson. From the beginning. At Little Big Horn."

  "Who is he?"

  "It's not something he can tell me," said Remo.

  "Why not? Look, I don't know if you realize what we're up against. But here is a person, a movement, a thing if you will, that cannot be stopped."

  "I stopped him."

  "No you didn't, Remo," said Smith. They had gone over all three incidents in detail, with Smith asking his usual calculated questions. And they had gone over them again and again. And each time, Smith became more worried.