"I asked you a question," the colonel stressed. The gun was now drawn. His face was serious.
"Listen, I've had a lousy day," Remo explained. "I had to meet with one of the last Communists in the world outside of Washington and I feel like I need a week-long shower to clean off. Mind if I borrow a jeep?"
That was it. He'd had it with this wacko. Let someone else deal with it. "I'm going to have to detain you," DeSouza said firmly.
The colonel was about to gesture to a few of his men with his gun when he suddenly realized that the gun was no longer there. He was waving with an empty hand. Quickly, he looked to the stranger, thinking that he must have disarmed him somehow.
Remo shook his head. "Check your holster," he said.
DeSouza did. His gun was back where he had gotten it. The snap was even attached.
"The way things are going around here, you may need it later," Remo said. "I might be able to stop things from getting any worse if you'll just get me a jeep."
Colonel DeSouza considered for a moment. Finally, he glanced back at his nervous men. "Get this man a jeep!" he shouted. Turning to face Remo, he said, "Are you some kind of spook or something?"
"Or something," Remo said.
The jeep was brought forward. A soldier was even offered as a driver. Remo declined.
"From what I've heard, the South is going to be even dicier than the North," he said as he climbed behind the wheel. "And I'm pretty rough on drivers."
"Good luck," Colonel DeSouza offered.
The stranger-who was obviously CIA or was with some other covert agency-answered in a most enigmatic way.
"I believe in luck about as much as I believe in fortune-tellers," Remo muttered, turning over the engine.
Flooring the jeep, Remo raced away from the Bridge of No Return, down toward the student encampment.
Chapter 24
He remembered the camp.
Freezing-cold winters that seemed to last forever. Scorching summers that took up the time between blizzards. And no food. He remembered the hunger more than anything.
The prisoners had been forced to work. Many died hollowing the great gun caves in Stone Mountain, which overlooked the DMZ. Still more had perished digging the eight story subbasement complex of the People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle, the deep basement bomb shelter of the presidential palace or the labyrinthine undergrounds of government buildings all around Pyongyang.
It seemed that anything the Democratic People's Republic of Korea deemed important was buried so far below the surface that no one without a pickax and a hundred years would ever see it.
Man Hyung Sun had seen it. At least in its rudimentary stages. And he remembered.
He had starved as he wielded his ax beside other laborers. They chipped away for hours upon hours. Day would come up on their chipping. Night would descend, and still the relentless chip-chip-chip sound would fill the dark shadows.
Only when the cloak of night had been pulled so tightly that even the North Korean soldiers who oversaw their work force recognized the difficulty of the task were the prisoners allowed to shuffle off to their camp. They were awakened before dawn to begin the process anew.
This was how Man Hyung Sun had spent several long years in the early part of his life.
Sun had once been a soldier under the command of Kim Il Sung himself. He had been a favorite of the future president during those dark days when Kim led a Korean unit in the Soviet army during World War II. But when Kim Il Sung had become president of the People's Republic in 1948, the seeds were sown for their eventual falling-out.
Man Hyung Sun had been opposed to the invasion of the South by Kim that led to the Korean War. The president saw his opposition as treachery. His former ally was thrown into prison without any more compassion than one might show an ant underfoot.
Sun lived for several long years in the camp. The work was hard, the food scarce. The hunger? Severe.
There were many times he thought he would die. Many more that he wished he would.
It was only by a miracle that Sun ever escaped. As the work detail was being led back to the prison one cold dark night, one of the guards got sloppy. His attention was drawn away. Afterward, Sun never could remember why.
A scuffed shoe. A stumbling prisoner. Perhaps one of the emaciated wretches farther along had died. It did not matter. Sun saw his opportunity and took it.
While the guard was looking away, Sun smashed him over the head with a rock. He did not creep up. No stealth was involved. Indeed, he could not have managed it if he had to.
He saw an opportunity and sloppily seized it.
The trip across the frozen wasteland to the DMZ had been arduous and fraught with difficulties. There were soldiers, dogs, mines. Even tanks and planes. Searchlights.
None were looking for him specifically. They were just the regular accoutrements of a Communist dictatorship.
By some miracle, he made it. By an even greater miracle, the Americans had let him across. Man Hyung Sun became a free man on that day. Penniless, starving but free.
Fortunately for him, he already spoke English, having taken many courses at university as a youth. He stayed in the South only a brief time, eventually moving on to America.
His single foolhardy experience opposing Kim Il Sung notwithstanding, Man Hyung Sun was nothing if not savvy. He soon learned that the Americans had a law that allowed churches to operate without paying taxes.
Sun needed money and food. It was a match made in heaven. He founded the Grand Unification Church in 1956.
It was amazing how easy it was to manipulate the minds of the imbecilic American youth. The first were ordinary converts. He needed to do nothing special to convince them to devote their lives to him. In a land as rich as America, the spoiled, idle children were looking for ways to avenge themselves against their parents for showering them with so much. Sun and his church became the ultimate vengeance.
The culture of sloth was beginning to erode the foundations of the great Western nation in the years immediately following the establishment of his church. America was on the cusp of the 1960s. Man Hyung Sun read the times like a clairvoyant.
During the full blossom of the sixties, his followers were commissioned to bring others into the flock. Whether they wanted to join or not.
Sun had not been a Communist for nothing. He knew all of the advanced brainwashing techniques taught to the North Korean government by their friends the Russians. The new recruits were quickly converted to the Grand Unification Church. In short order, they were in airports all around the country haranguing travelers with flowers, tambourines and words of love from the Reverend Man Hyung Sun.
For more than a decade, parents were reluctant to charge the church with taking their children against their will. Most attributed the new attitude of their offspring to dope, free love, whatever. It was the times, after all. The kids would come around.
They didn't.
Only when the sixties became the seventies did people begin to look more deeply at the "conversion" tactics of the Reverend Sun. He managed to escape criminal prosecution on these charges, but it was during this closer scrutiny that his nonchurch-related tax irregularities became evident to the federal government.
Sun went back to prison.
It was not as it had been in North Korea. He had more food than he could eat, and he was still able to run his religious empire from inside. Upon his release, he decided to take a more low-key approach to his religion.
Property became very important to Sun. Also his Washington newspaper, which he frequently used as a forum to harass his old friend, now bitter enemy, Kim Il Sung.
It was while working at his newspaper that he began hearing stories of a place out west. Supposedly, for a fee, one could learn the future there.
The service was only available to the very wealthy or the very connected. Actors, businessmen, politicians-all swore by this place.
Something about the story intrigued Sun. It was not
on a conscious level. More of a dream trying to push itself into the reality of his daily life.
Sun planned to visit the ranch where the prophesying was alleged to take place, but history was one step ahead of him. There was an explosion at the Truth Church. Along with many deaths. Sun had been too late. Or so he thought.
The day of the explosion at Ranch Ragnarok was the day he began having the visions.
They were bizarre, surreal images. Waking dreams.
There was the great plain. As vast as time and space itself. A sky so red it was as if it had been painted in thick daubs of blood. Ground as bloody as the sky above. And sitting in the center of the lonely battlefield, a single morose figure. A patch of yellow. Beckoning. Always beckoning. Calling out to Man Hyung Sun.
He had been chosen. He did not know why, only that he had been selected above all others.
The spirit was frail. The visions strong at times, weak at others. It took many months to realize what was being communicated to him. During this time, he did as the mysterious, dreamlike figure suggested. More Sunnies were indoctrinated into the faith. The sailors aboard the U.S.S. Courage, some New York police officers, some South Korean student protestors, as well as several other individuals-the importance of all of whom was unknown to Sun. He merely did as the spirit commanded. Still, he did not know where to locate this strange force. It took him a great deal of soulsearching to find out.
When he was finally certain, the reverend had dispatched his Sunnie servants to find Michael Princippi and to find the urn of the Pythia the exgovernor had carried away from the ruins of the ranch in Wyoming.
Sun needed only to come in contact with Princippi to know that the former governor had been ignoring the signals being sent to him by the Pythia. The essence of the spirit was strong within the sneaky technocrat. The Pythia had been trying desperately to seek his aid, but Princippi had ignored it. Sun was not like the ex-governor. He had heeded the call.
It was glorious. Once the urn of yellow powder was in his possession, the waking dreams were far more powerful. There was someone else in his mind at all times.
The Pythia was stronger when Sun was near the urn, but once he had accepted the essence of the ancient offshoot of the Greek god Apollo within him, not a moment passed wherein he did not feel the presence lurking within him.
It was fitting. In Greek mythology, Apollo had driven the chariot of the sun across the sky. His fractured essence had sought out one called Sun.
In his first moment of complete possession, Sun had been given a vision by the Pythia. A gift to reward him for his loyal service. Blessed with the ability to foretell the future, the yellow spirit had let Sun see himself in the very near future. He would be a king. The nation he had fled in ignominy would be his to rule over. There would be no North, no South. It would be complete. Whole. Under the iron fist of Man Hyung Sun.
Sun loved that vision, lived for it. It was like a drug to which he had become hopelessly addicted. He longed to see it now, as he stood on that desolate plain in his mind.
THE PYTHIA SLUMPED before him. A strange combination of yellow cloud and human features. Only in this place of unreality could the images be remotely reconciled.
"I grow weaker still," the Pythia lamented. The voice that rattled up the spirit's throat was a pathetic rasp.
"The Greek who ignored your entreaties is no more," Sun offered, as if to cheer up the ancient spirit.
"Do you think I do not know? It is I who told you of his treachery." Squatting in the misery of its own yellow smoke, the Pythia shook its head bitterly. "The time I wasted on that Greek. If my master were here, if my strength were greater, he would not have ignored me. My power was once feared by man. I am a shell of what I once was."
Sun seemed uncomfortable. "You are a powerful seer," he said. He tried to think of something that would bolster the Pythia's flagging spirits. "My 900 line is ringing off the hook," he offered suddenly.
At this, the Pythia looked up at Sun. There was a scornful expression on its bronzed face.
"Vengeance propels me, though my spirit longs for nothingness," the Pythia intoned. "It is time."
"For what?" Sun asked.
"Time to crush my enemies."
Sun's heart raced. The Pythia had prophesied to him that his time of ascendancy would come immediately on the heels of the final defeat of the men from Sinanju.
"What do you wish for me to do, O Prophet?"
"The young one is already in place. Your minions have done well to draw him into my trap."
"Thank you, Great Herald," Sun said proudly.
"It is time to bring the old one there, as well."
Sun's face clouded. "I thought it was your wish to keep them apart."
"It was. It no longer is. The time has come that we should bring them together." The Pythia smiled. "And set them against one another."
And as the Pythia went on to describe its plan to the Reverend Sun, the cult leader could not help but smile, as well. Their deaths-and his future-were all but assured.
CHIUN WAS SITTING in his balcony sunroom, which overlooked the grounds of Sun's estate, when the reverend knocked on his door once more. The Master of Sinanju bade the cult leader enter.
"I have been meditating," Sun said, sitting across from Chiun on the balcony.
The Master of Sinanju did not bother to mention that the all too familiar stench of Sun's after-shave had preceded him into the room yet again. Every time Sun meditated, he came back smelling like a French brothel. His breathing shallow, the old Korean merely nodded.
"I have had a revelation," Sun continued. "It is time."
Sitting in a lotus position on the floor, Chiun had not yet opened his eyes. He did so now.
"Time for what?" he asked, not daring to allow hope to betray his studied tone. The answer sent his soul soaring.
"Pyon ha-da is upon us," Sun said. "As is my moment of greatness. We must return in haste to the land of our birth so that I might be allowed to ascend to my proper place as leader of unified Korea. I wish you to be at my side."
Chiun rose from the floor like a puff of thin smoke. "It will be my joy to safeguard your holy life, Seer of pyon ha-da," the Master of Sinanju intoned, squeaky voice chiming with undisguised joy. The bow he gave to Man Hyung Sun was reverential.
Chapter 25
The student activists of the South were more difficult to get through than the whole of the People's Defense Forces of the North from Pyongyang to the demilitarized zone.
In his U.S. Army jeep, Remo Williams had to dodge bricks, bottles, rocks, sticks and just about anything else the "peace-loving" student demonstrators found to throw.
As he was racing through the streets of Seoul, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail onto the hood of his speeding jeep. The bottle crashed with the sound of shattering china, and the gasoline mixture splattered orange flames back across the windshield. Remo drove through the fire.
Riot police were out in full force. White helmets protected heads while thick transparent face shields extended down to bulletproof vests. Kevlar gloves and blast-resistant shields completed the rest of the armor the police had been forced to wear over their jumpsuits.
From the look of the debris field that was the streets of Seoul, the demonstrations by the students had taken a bad turn during the previous night. Charred cars lined the road, some still sending plumes of acrid smoke into the clear winter-blue sky.
Remo weaved his way through students and police alike, arriving relatively unscathed at the South Korean National Assembly building.
Roving packs of students could be seen wandering between buildings and cars. They looked like the irate villagers out of an old horror movie, determined to rid the local castle of an evil scientist. All they needed were a few pitchforks and some torches to complete the image.
Remo prayed that for now his vehicle would be safe from the students. He didn't plan to leave it there long.
He abandoned the jeep by the side of the road. At a ru
n, Remo flew up the stairs and into the big building.
PRESIDENT KIM DAE JUNG had personally called for the secret emergency meeting of the Kuk Hoe, the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea. All 299 members of the unicameral body were present, as well as every cabinet and high-ranking security officer in the nation. With the number of people crammed inside the assembly hall, the president wondered how long his secret meeting would remain a secret.
The issue before them was one he had not thought to seriously face in his lifetime. Reunification with the North. It had been brought up many times in the past, but it had always been unthinkable to reasonable people. But reason had taken a holiday since the American bombing of Seoul National University.
"The Americans take our relationship for granted!" the ranking member of the Party for Peace and Democracy shouted from behind the podium. "They believe that they can drop bombs on our heads and we will still scurry over to them like dogs beneath their master's table. It is time we demonstrate to the powers of the West that we, too, are a force to be reckoned with. Only a unified Korea can show such strength."
It was the same speech many others had given. From his seat behind the main podium of the parliamentary chamber, the president watched the faces in the crowd.
Only about one-fifth were from the Reunification Democratic Party. These were usually the ones screaming for talks with the North at every perceived slight from the West. But they had remained largely silent this day. Suppressing grins, they had watched others from more conservative parties get up and give the same speeches they had given in the past.
The president had tried to call for calm in the face of this latest crisis. Washington had apologized for the Tomahawk incident. Screaming would not bring the dead back to life. Nor would it rebuild either the destroyed portion of the university or the fragile bridge to the West.
He was shouted down.
The entire nation was spinning out of control. If these supposedly rational elected officials were so frenzied over this issue, there was little hope for the rest of South Korea. Indeed, the rioting overnight in Seoul had been the worst in the president's memory. And he had been an activist and political prisoner years before.
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