Bidding War td-101

by Warren Murphy

  The president of South Korea hesitated. It was a difficult choice. The choice of spirit general would have a very great impact upon the value of the wisdom dispensed.

  He consulted with his advisers in hushed tones.

  "The Fire General," urged the unification minister.

  "No, the White Horse General," the CIA director insisted.

  Waving at them to be quiet, the president spoke to the Wart Woman, by reputation the most oracular Mudang in all of Korea.

  "Can you summon MacArthur?" he asked.

  "Hee-hee! MacArthur will speak to you through my mouth."

  Flinging herself to the racked clothing, she donned a khaki military uniform and service cap. At her dang shrine, she performed certain rites, singing in a caterwauling voice.

  The kut had begin.

  Soon she was in a trance and flinging herself about the room. Abruptly she fell into a sitting position on the floor, looking at them with eyes that were no longer hers. Even her face lost its semisenile looseness.

  "Gentleman," she said through her bobbing corncob pipe, "what seems to be your problem?" All three men would have sworn her new voice belonged to General Douglas MacArthur, savior of South Korea—if only Truman had shown wisdom.

  "The new peril from the North," the president stammered. "Is it real?"

  "The foe you fear is headed for Pyongyang right this minute."

  The president swallowed hard. "What is your advice to us?"

  "One word."

  The three leaders leaned forward to await the wisdom from the rubbery lips of the Wart Woman, who spoke in the true voice of the great American general.

  "Attack!" she said.

  Chapter Forty-one

  The Master of Sinanju was escorted to an underground complex in a fenced-off area immediately south of Beijing.

  As he entered, accompanied by high-ranking generals and others, he surveyed the flat surrounding countryside and said, "I see no rocket."

  "It is underground," he was told.

  "American rockets stand upon the ground, no doubt so as to save fuel because that places them closer to the sky," another said.

  "Russian and American armies are jealous of our rockets, for they are the greatest in the world," said a third. "They would bomb them if they could find them. So we are forced to place them safely underground."

  "Ah," said the Master of Sinanju as they passed steel door upon steel door that had to be rolled back with dual keys turned by two hands standing on opposite sides of the corridor. This, he was informed, was a security measure so no unauthorized person could unlock the doors.

  At the end of a concrete corridor lay a great door like the one King Solomon had barring his treasury, according to Master Boo.

  "You may enter the rocket."

  "I see no rocket."

  "The inside of the rocket is behind this door. You have only to enter, the door will be closed and sealed and the ride into destiny will begin."

  "Very well. Open the door to destiny."

  It was done with three men turning three keys this time, and the thick steel door parted in the middle, the sides separating.

  A dark space was revealed. Machine smells came from within, offending the nose of the Master of Sinanju. He hesitated.

  "Enter please. We are ready to launch."

  Chiun faced them, eyes and voice knife-thin. "Know, soldiers of the Han, that if you fail to bring me back correctly, a great and terrible punishment will be inflicted upon you by my son, who may be white but is true to Sinanju."

  The faces of the Han were suddenly still. Their eyes glittered as their lids compressed. If they took offense, it didn't show.

  With that, the Master of Sinanju entered the dank chamber, and the great doors resealed with a empty clang.

  In the darkness the thin eyes of Chiun gathered the dying shards and fragments of light and assembled them so that he could see.

  The chamber was a concrete cylinder and hung with great electrical cables. Water dripped, stagnant and old. Somewhere a rat skittered on the broken floor. The chemical smell was overpowering, so the Master of Sinanju began breathing shallowly.

  Looking up, Chiun beheld a great dark maw suspended over his aged head, like a tremendous bell, much like the one employed by the kings of the Silla Kingdom to punish criminals by inserting their heads into the hollow and setting the metal to violent ringing by pounding mallets.

  Except there was no room for mallets or men between the bell and the great concrete cistern in which it hung.

  But somewhere above, something went click like an electrical relay closing. And great engines began to turn, so slowly that only the ears of a Master of Sinanju could detect their first faint revolutions.

  The official Hong Qui—Red Flag—car slithered through the installation checkpoint without Remo being noticed.

  As it approached, he had slid off the car roof and was clinging to the side where no one could see him, not the passengers, not the gate guard on the opposite side.

  When the vehicle rolled inside, Remo looked around. He saw tall grass and a few funny-looking gingko trees.

  As the car slowed in its approach to a bunkerlike building, he noticed the green steel missile silo roof door on its sliding track several hundred yards away, fringed by gingko trees to provide overhead camouflage.

  "Uh-oh," he said to himself, "looks like an underground missile site. Better find Chiun fast."

  The car doors opened and the passengers emptied out in a rush. One stumbled and was called by the other, "FangTung!"

  And suddenly Remo remembered that pungent phrase had been used by the nameless drive-by killers back in Massachusetts.

  Coming out of his crouch by the car, Remo slipped up behind the two officers as they approached a blank steel door in the concrete blockhouse.

  One inserted a magnetic keycard, the door began rolling open and Remo reached out and took each man by the spine.

  They had time to bleat out the first microsecond of what was meant to be a blood-curdling scream. But all electrical and brain activity ceased when their spines exited their backs, pulling out all life. Without lumbar support, they fell into each other and collapsed. Remo stepped over them.

  Inside he wasted no time.

  "Chiun, where are you?"

  That brought three PLA guards in green running.

  If their slack-jawed expressions meant anything, the sight of a Westerner stupefied them into inaction. So Remo stepped in and blended their Kalashnikovs into a kind of fuzzy metallic cocoon in which their arms were inextricably tangled.

  He moved on, leaving them to their helpless weeping.

  There were layers of steel control doors and matching guards along a single corridor with no branching paths. That took away all the guesswork. Remo simply bulled through.

  Doors meant to be opened electronically surrendered to the pressure of his steel-hard fingers insinuating themselves into stout frames and forcing them apart.

  Guards tried to stop him with a combination of bullets and kung fu. The kung-fu boys got the worst of it because their weapons were part of their bodies, and Remo felt obliged to disarm everybody so he could get out again without problems.

  Once bloodied stumps began flying about, no one tried to kung fu Remo Williams again. In fact, resistance pretty much died down. PLA security forces retreated like scientists in a B-grade fifties horror film before the rampaging monster.

  "Great," Remo grumbled. "By the time I reach the end, I'm going to have to take out a small army."

  When he forced the last door open and found himself in a control room, Remo demanded in a loud voice, "Where is my father!"

  Perhaps it was the sight of the mad foreign devil with the powers of the gods. Perhaps it was the sheer mounting terror his crashing intrusion had caused. Or maybe it was just that nobody clearly understood English.

  The huddled knot of frightened and trembling officials said nothing.

  But from behind a great double steel door
, the squeaky voice of the Master of Sinanju called, "I am here, son in truth!"

  And then Remo spotted a hand surreptitiously trying to turn two firing keys at once at a corner console.

  "Chiun! Get outa there!" said Remo, racing for the door.

  On the other side the Master of Sinanju heard the urgency in his adopted son's voice and dug his long nails into the crack between the two steel door valves. He pushed aside the weaker of the two. Stubborn, it began to screech in complaint.

  As the door resisted, he sensed Remo on the other side, pushing the other valve in the opposite direction.

  "Hurry, Remo! For I hear machines."

  "You're underneath a fucking nuclear missile, and it's about to launch!" Remo yelled.

  And the doors, mighty, implacable, surrendered with howls and shrieks of protest as the muscle and bone and will of the two mightiest human beings on the face of the earth pitted their inexhaustible energies against the tempered steel.

  The doors parted, the Master of Sinanju slipped out like a silken ghost and, as he stood free once more, behind him grew a dull roar.

  "Let's go!" Remo screamed.

  They ran.

  The others tried to run, too. But they were but mortals, flat and flabby without training or proper breathing.

  Only a Master of Sinanju was fleet enough to out-race catastrophic death.

  The great Long March missile belched fuel and trembled as the silo roof rolled back on its tracks to allow it to take wing.

  Remo and Chiun zipped through the corridors strewn with the dead and out of the blockhouse.

  Throwing himself flat, Remo yelled, "Get down!"

  Chiun dropped in the lee of the blockhouse. The air was shaking. Songbirds uplifted from the sparse gingko trees, frantic and wild.

  With a majestic slowness the lipstick red nose cone of the Long March missile emerged from the earth like a dormant giant and lifted and lifted until it stood poised on a column of white-hot chemical fire.

  The boiling air consumed treetops, branches, even birds on the wing, who were scorched to charred bone and dropped to the ground more like spent coal than dead things that once lived.

  Roaring and roaring, the missile vaulted into the sky.

  The air shook for a long time after it was gone.

  When it was safe, Remo stood up. "It's okay, Little Father."

  "Not for those who sought my life," said the Master of Sinanju, for from the blockhouse door crept tendrils of smoke that mixed chemical rocket fuel with the unmistakable sickly sweet smell of roasted human flesh.

  "What the hell was that all about?" Remo wanted to know.

  Chiun patted his kimono clean of dust. "I was to be the first Korean in the Great Void," he said unhappily.

  "You were almost the first human Korean barbecue. By the way, those guys who tried to kill us back home? Chinese. Probably sleeper agents."

  "How do you know this?"

  "Each time someone swore in Chinese. Any idea what 'Fang Tung' means?"

  Chiun nodded. "It is an Han insult, meaning 'turtle's egg.' Come, Remo. Obviously there will be no service to be had from the Han."

  "Where to next?"

  "Russia."

  "Great," Remo said dispiritedly.

  "I am glad you approve," the Master of Sinanju said blandly as he allowed Remo to hold the Chinese limousine door open for him.

  "I'd prefer Canada. They're not big on violence up there."

  "A client who does not fear Sinanju would not appreciate Sinanju," Chiun sniffed. "Even Smith had the good taste to shoot at me when he realized Sinanju was lost to him."

  Remo jumped behind the wheel and got the car going. "Smitty did that? Why didn't you tell me?"

  The Master of Sinanju rearranged his kimono skirts carefully. "We were leaving America. I did wish you to see him in a good light, ere you cling to your homeland with the stubborn nostalgia of your past."

  Chapter Forty-two

  No one knew when it would happen, or even if it would happen at all.

  But everyone knew how it would happen. The elements had been in place for more than forty years, strung along the most heavily armed and fortified border in human history. The scenario had been analyzed and war-gamed to death.

  Every simulation assumed a sudden thrust from the north, overwhelming the entrenched southern forces. Seoul would fall. There was no denying that.

  Victory, if it was to happen, would come in the counterattack, it was assumed.

  All the scenarios were wrong. They were wrong for a very specific reason.

  They assumed North Korea would attack South Korea. Ultimately it didn't happen that way.

  General Winfield Scott Hornworks knew it was a mistake. A colossal mistake. It was the mistake of mistakes. The mother of all mistakes.

  He liked to use that phrase, "mother of all mistakes." "Mother of all hemorrhoids" was another favorite. As the general who had led the multinational United Nations force to victory in the Mother of All Battles, better known as the Gulf War, he felt he had some basis for being an authority on the subject. The decision, handed down by the JCS, was the biggest pain in the ass to come his way since the Tet Offensive.

  "Are you out of your cotton-picking mind? Sir," General Hornworks had barked barely a year before.

  "The decision has been made at the highest levels, General. We are turning operational control of all South Korean forces over to the South Koreans. You ire relieved of all responsibility for ROK troops."

  "Begging your pardon, sir," General Hornworks had said in a strangled voice. "But if damn Kim Jong II takes a mind to send his forces south, unified command and control is gonna be all-important to victory. We do want victory here in the Land of the Rising Sun, don't we?"

  "It's 'Land of the Morning Calm. 'Rising Sun' is Japanese."

  "So noted, sir," said General Hornworks. "But getting back to the catastrophe at hand—and make no mistake, we've got us a beaut on the horizon if this Hoes through."

  "It's through. Decided. Live with it, General."

  "It ain't the living with that rankles me, sir. It's the dyin' from it. We got over a million North Koreans hanging over our heads like so many human cluster bombs. They get the word and next thing you know they'll be pouring across the damn DMZ, yelling 'Mansai!'"

  "I think you're thinking of the Japanese again."

  "Allow me to correct you, sir. The Japs yell Banzai. The Koreans yell Mansai, and my silver-haired daddy told me enough stories about his days in the Korean War to freeze the blood. It was worse than Nam. I don't want to live through what my poor daddy did. So you gotta get this asinine decision re pealed. Sir."

  "It's final. I'm sorry. But the thinking in Washing ton is that even with the economic aid we're providing Pyongyang, the regime will collapse of its own weight. Then the South can take control without fir ing a shot."

  "That's a right pretty theory, sir. But the Koreans have a little saying of their own."

  "Yes?"

  "I die, you die, all die."

  The JCS chair had nothing to say to that. He gave General Hornworks his best and wished him Godspeed. And General Hornworks duly thanked him and spent the next hour retching up solids.

  Retirement had beckoned General Winfield Scott Hornworks after his miraculous triumph in the Gulf War. Some talked of running him for high office. The truth was, all he wanted was to get the sand out of his boots and the Arab allies out of his hair.

  So when he was offered the position of supreme commander of joint Korean defense forces, he had leapt at it. This was Cold War stuff. General Hornworks had grown up in the Cold War. He understood the Cold War. He didn't understand the Middle East or what the Pentagon was now calling OOTW—Operations Other Than War. He was a soldier. Trained to fight. Not keep the peace.

  Holding the line against the godless Commies. That, General Winfield Scott Hornworks understood.

  Just as he understood that if it came to all-out war, his ass was hanging out, politically and cor
porally.

  So when General Hornworks was relieved of control over ROK forces, he began each day personally walking the wire, looking for gaps and spy tunnels that might be a prelude to the long-feared invasion.

  Barbed wire ran across the Thirty-eighth Parallel like an unhealed scar, but in the end Hornworks knew force fields couldn't hold back the North. They had, per capita, the largest standing army on earth, and as the months rolled by, the frontline forces were getting hungrier and colder and less and less likely to listen to whoever was supposed to be in charge in Pyongyang.

  No one knew anymore. Some said Jong was dead. Others said he had been imprisoned while his half brother, Kim Pyong II, ran things. Others said both were dead and the generals ran the show.

  Even though he was a general himself, this was Hornworks's worst-case scenario. The North was slipping into famine and deprivation. Generals fight wars. They don't build industries or feed people. If push came to shove, the generals would send all of North Korea south to chow down rather than see their egg-sucking asses hanging from Pyongyang lamp posts.

  As he walked the line, the first snap of the fall was in the air. Over on the other side, the enemy had traded in their green helmets for Russian-style fur hats. Winter was coming. And with it more cold and the gnawing winter hunger that moved mountains. And motivated armies.

  Satisfied that the line hadn't been breached through the night, he started back for his Humvee. The clattering of an OH-58 Bell helicopter came to his ears.

  The chopper dropped onto the cold ground, and a major came running out, white as a ghost, saluting reflexively.

  "General. They're on the move!"

  "No! God in heaven say it isn't true. Tell me we're not talking a damn Northern human-wave assault."

  "We're not, sir."

  "Then what the hell are you jabbering about?" the general asked.

  "Sir! It's the ROK forces."

  "What about them?"

  "They're moving this way."

  "What in tarnation for?"

  "No one knows. But they look hell-bent on war."

  Climbing into the chopper, General Hornworks was taken upstairs in jig time. The chopper turned south, clattering angrily.

  A triple column of tanks was rolling up Unification Road. Highway 1. The main invasion path.