The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  The number rang. Remo held the black telephone attached to a unit in the front of the car. He stood outside the driver's window. When he heard the crisp "Yes" from Smith, Remo said:

  "I am still on an open line."

  "Go ahead," said Smith. "What do you have?"

  "I found the source of that thing that opens up the ozone layer."

  "Good. Where?"

  Remo gave him the name and address of the firm in America. "Do you want me to return and close in on them? Or do you want to do it yourself? You're there in America."

  "Hold on," said Smith.

  Remo smiled at the group of men in the back of the car. The colonel glowered back. The intelligence officer stared ahead glumly. In the field, the lab technicians were comparing watches. Remo whistled as he waited for Smith. "Okay," said Smith.

  "Do you want to handle it there, or do we have enough time for me to fly back and do it right?"

  "I want you to keep looking, Remo. Not only is there no such company as Sunorama of Buttesville, Arkansas, but there isn't even a Buttesville, Arkansas."

  Remo returned to the laboratory technician and offered to fix the man's watch by running it through his ears and out through his nose if he didn't tell the truth.

  "That's the name we have. We're participating in the experiment for Dr. O'Donnell. It's her company. That was the name she gave. Really."

  Remo tended to believe the man. Most people told the truth when their dorsal root ganglion was compressed painfully into the sensory neuron along the spinal cord. Sometimes they would cry. Sometimes they would yell. But they always told the truth. This lab technician opened his mouth to yell when Remo allowed the pain to subside and thus enabled him to talk.

  "Fine," said Remo. "Where is Dr. O'Donnell?"

  "She left with a Russian-speaking guy," said the technician.

  Remo noticed at that very moment that there were no British bobbies on the scene, no protection around this field that the intelligence personnel of America's ally had tried to keep hidden from America. Who was on whose side, and who was the Russian?

  Chapter 4

  Harold W. Smith calculated, on a small old-fashioned piece of white paper, a line going up signaling reports of new missile sites in the Soviet Union. Also going up was the possibility of a rupture in the ozone shield that might not be closed.

  It was a race as to which would destroy them all first. And Smith could only handle one line at a time. He had Remo.

  If he had Chiun, he could launch the aged assassin into Russia, a good place for him. For some strange reason, Chiun seemed to be able to predict the Russians quite well. Chiun also seemed to be able to communicate with anyone, perhaps a necessity for a member of a house of assassins that had been around for thousands of years.

  Under a secret agreement, Smith was not only allowed to send in gold by submarine, but he was able to contact Pyongyang when Chiun returned. Yet even that had changed.

  Smith briefly wondered if the change had something to do with the Russian response. Even though the North Koreans were their closest ally in the world, the Russians did not trust them. They looked upon them as some poor cousins, an international embarrassment they were forced to endure. It was not even much of a secret. Almost every intelligence agency in the world had monitored the pleas of North Korea seeking Russian respect.

  Few people knew it at the time, least of all Smith in his Folcroft headquarters on Long Island Sound, monitoring the approaching destruction of the world, but the President for Life of North Korea had left the moment the Master of Sinanju landed. He had done it on the assurance that it would be best for him to be out of the country when the Master of Sinanju found out what had happened in his village.

  The district colonel who followed a full twenty paces behind the Master of Sinanju did not know what his superiors planned, either. He was told only not to provoke the Master of Sinanju. No one was to address the Master unless spoken to.

  The Master had landed and walked through the honor guard, as though they blocked his way in some line, right through to the waiting limousine. He was immediately driven to the village of Sinanju. The colonel, like all security officers, could not enter. This village, alone among all places in North Korea, was allowed to keep its old ways. It paid no taxes, and once a year an American submarine was permitted to land in Sinanju and off-load cargo. Of this irregularity, the colonel knew only that it was not a spy mission and that he was not to interfere. The business of Sinanju was the business of Sinanju, he had been told, and was not the concern of Pyongyang. The Master of Sinanju would look after his village. And now that fabled entity, this Master of Sinanju, had returned to Korea because of something worse than a disgrace. A tragedy.

  The colonel had been ordered to grant this frail old man's every wish. His superior, General Toksa, told him to report those wishes to himself, and the colonel knew that the general was to report the same to Himself, President for Life, Kim Il Sung. The colonel shivered a moment at the thought of his responsibility.

  Not everyone reacted that way. As they walked through the airport, youngsters laughed at the strange kimono worn by the Master of Sinanju. Even a state security officer burst out laughing.

  The Master of Sinanju spoke for the first time, using a term outlawed for forty years:

  "Japanese kissers," he spat. It was an epithet dating from the time of the Japanese occupation. Many secret tales survived about Koreans who had collaborated with the hated Japanese. When the colonel had taken over the northwest province, which included Sinanju, he had heard that the Japanese never dared to enter Sinanju, and that before, when China occupied Korea, the Chinese never entered Sinanju. But it was whispered that in times past, the throne of the White Chrysanthemum in Japan and all the dynasties of China had sent tribute to the tiny village on the West Korean Bay. Yet they had never entered it. Neither had the colonel. But now, because of what had happened, he would at last see what secrets that village had. He had been ordered not to mention what had happened at Sinanju, but to take very careful notes of the Master of Sinanju's every reaction. Nothing this man said was to go unrecorded. Nothing this man did was to go unnoticed. But the colonel was to do nothing but report.

  So he listened in silence and with as much dignity as he could muster to the many treasons now issuing forth from the Master of Sinanju.

  The new uniforms would better serve as dressing for meat than for people, said Chiun. He said he could sense that the soldiers of Himself, Kim Il Sung, had replaced courage with viciousness, a sure sign that they had not gotten over kissing Japanese backsides. He called the Third World poster on the airport wall an admission that Korea was still backward because everyone outside of Korea knew that "Third World" was just another term for inferior, backward, less. And Korea was never less. It was better. The trouble was that Koreans themselves failed to appreciate that.

  "I am Korean," the Master of Sinanju told the colonel. "You are Korean. Look at you. And look at me. I am glad my son born in America is not here to behold you."

  The colonel drew himself up against the implied insult. "I am a superior officer. I am a colonel," he said proudly. "In the pot you keep by the bed for the wastes of your body, what do you see float to the top, colonel?" asked the Master of Sinanju.

  The crowds in the airport suddenly hushed. No one ever talked to a colonel of state security in such a way, a district colonel at that.

  And thus did Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, return to the land of Korea by airplane. Thus was he met by a toady in uniform and taken many miles from Pyongyang, west to the fishing village of Sinanju, as the toady made notes of all he saw and all that was said by the Master of Sinanju.

  The village was rich in pigs and grain. The colonel noticed that there were several very large old-fashioned storehouses, indicating the village people never suffered from want or famine. He noted, too, that when the elderly man named Chiun approached the village from a hilltop, there were cries from below and the people ran away in fe
ar.

  Chiun saw and heard them, and told the colonel to wait on the hilltop while he went into his village, or swift death would be his reward for disobedience. The colonel remained in his jeep and Chiun walked down into the village and the silence therein.

  The rich smells of fish and pig meat filled the desolate village, for the food was still cooking. But no children laughed and played, and no elders appeared to give thanks for the beneficence of the House of Sinanju that had kept them fed through the centuries, even through times of famine, fed and healthy before the West was strong, before even the dynasties of China with their great armies marched where they willed. Only the waves crashed by way of greeting, cold and froth white against the dark rock shores of Sinanju.

  There was silence for the first time as a Master of Sinanju returned, instead of proper songs of triumph, and joyous laudations. Chiun was grateful that Remo did not see this-Remo, whom Chiun had enough trouble convincing of the glory of this village and the place he was destined to take here, Remo, who Chiun hoped would one day take a bride from this village to produce a male child to carry on the way of Sinanju so that he would not have to stoop to take a foreigner, as Chiun had. This then was the small blessing of this tragic day.

  Chiun accepted the insult. The villagers would return to their pig meat and fish and rice and sweet cakes. Their stomachs would bring them back. They ate almost as badly as Remo used to eat. But, for them, it did not matter. No emperor would call upon them for service. No glory would ever be theirs, no demand would ever be placed on their bodies that required them to eat so that those bodies functioned at their utmost. Chiun remembered how, as a youngster, he had asked his father if he could feast on the rich meats his friends enjoyed, the meats his father's own services abroad paid for.

  "It is hardest for the young to realize this," his father, who was then the reigning Master of Sinanju, had said. "But you are getting a greater gift than meat. You are becoming something they are not. You are earning tomorrow. You will thank me and remember this when they bow to you and the world again sings glorious praises to the Masters of Sinanju, as they did in centuries past."

  "But I want the meat now," young Chiun had said.

  "But you will not want it then."

  "But it is now, not then, not tomorrow."

  "I told you it was hard for a young man, for the young do not know tomorrow. But you will know."

  And he did, of course. Chiun thought back to the days of Remo's early training and the difficulty of overcoming the bad habits of almost thirty years and the handicap of being white. He had spoken the same words to Remo, and Remo answered:

  "Blow it out your ears."

  Then Remo had eaten a hamburger after years of training and almost died. At the time, Chiun had scolded Remo, neglecting to mention that he, too, had snuck a piece of meat and his father had forced him to vomit it out. As far as Remo knew, all Masters of Sinanju were obedient in the extreme, except for Remo, who was disobedient in the extreme. Chiun wondered how troublesome Remo would have been had he ever realized that one of the qualities that made great Masters was their independence. He would probably be uncontrollable now, Chiun decided.

  And so the Master of Sinanju stood in the middle of his village waiting for his people to return, thinking of Remo and wondering what Remo was doing now, glad Remo was not seeing this shame, but also sad that he was not here.

  A night passed. And during the night, Chiun heard the villagers clumsily sneaking back into their homes to fill their bellies with dead burned pig. There was even a side of spitted beef steaming upwind. It smelled so much of meat that Chiun thought he might be back in America. In the morning, however, one came out to give the Master of Sinanju the traditional greeting:

  "Hail, Master of Sinanju, who sustains the village and keeps the code faithfully, leader of the House of Sinanju. Our hearts cry a thousand greetings of love and adoration. Joyous are we upon the return of him who graciously throttles the universe."

  Another came, and then another, and still more while the Master of Sinanju regarded them all with unmoving visage and steely eye. When the sun was full over the village and they were all assembled, Chiun spoke:

  "Shame. Shame on you. What do you have to fear from a Master of Sinanju that you flee to the hills as though I were a Japanese warrior, or a Chinese. Have not the Masters of Sinanju proved a greater protection than any wall? Have not the Masters of Sinanju gone out from this village and kept it fed, lo, these many centuries? Did not the Masters of Sinanju keep Sinanju the only fishing village on the West Korea Bay that did not have to surrender its babies to the cold ocean for want of food? You do not fish well. You do not farm well. And yet you eat well. All because of the Master of Sinanju. And when I return, you run. O shame. O shame that I should keep burning in my bosom in silence."

  And the villagers fell to their faces, begging mercy. "We were afraid," they cried. "The treasure has been stolen. Centuries of tribute given to Sinanju are gone."

  "Did you steal it?"

  "No, great Master."

  "Then why are you afraid?"

  "Because we failed to guard the treasure."

  "You never guarded anything, nor were you supposed to," explained the Master of Sinanju. "Our reputation has guarded the treasures of Sinanju. Your duty is to give homage to the great Masters of Sinanju, and report all that transpires while they are away."

  Now an old man, who remembered Chiun in his youth, and the kindnesses shown by the Master, and feats of strength demonstrated for the amusement of the young, spoke up:

  "I watched," said the wizened old man, his voice cracking. "I remember my duty, O young Chiun. There were many who came. And they came with guns, taking a full day to remove all the treasure from your house."

  "Did you tell them they were stealing the treasure of Sinanju?" asked Chiun.

  "Yes, yes," cried the crowd.

  But the old man sadly shook his head.

  "No. No one did. We were all afraid," the old man said, tears streaming from his slitted eyes which, like Chiun's, were hazel in color.

  Chiun stretched out a long-nailed hand, as if in blessing, and said:

  "Because of your honesty and loyalty, this village will be spared the consequences of its treason. Because of you, your single act of loyalty, the honor of Sinanju has been preserved. You alone will walk with me, ancient one, and be revered when I leave because of what you have dared to tell this day. You have done well."

  And so, the old man at his side, Chiun walked to the house where the treasure of Sinanju had been stored. The house had been built by Egyptian architects sent by Tutankhamen as tribute to Sinanju. They built it on what was rare in Korea, a foundation of stone, not wood. But upon that stone, they raised a jewel of wood-the finest teaks, firs, and ebonies, lacquered and artfully painted. The Greek kings had provided glass of a clarity not seen again until the West learned to produce it as freely as the myriad wheat of the field.

  There were rooms of ivory and alabaster. Scents from India, and Chinese silk. The drachma, rupee, dinar, shekel, boul, reel, and stoneweight of silver had all known a home here. It had been a place of plenty. But now, in utter shock, Chiun beheld bare floors in the house of the Master of Sinanju, floors which had not been bare since the first Roman legion marched from a little city on the Tiber. Even the walls of the room used to store the gold of Cyrus the Great of Persia were shorn of their leaf.

  On the bare walls, Chiun could read the ancient Persian inscriptions instructing the workmen who were to lay the leaf, with a note cautioning them that this was for the house of the powerful Wi. Gone and gone were the treasures of Sinanju, no matter where Chiun looked. Rooms of fresh dust and bleached squares where chests had rested for centuries filled the barren house.

  The old man was weeping.

  "Why do you weep?" asked Chiun gently.

  "So much has been taken. Your father took me through this house when I was a child. It is all gone. The gold. The ivory. The jewels and the great
statues carved in amber and jade. O, the jade alone, O great Master, was an emperor's treasure."

  "That was not what was stolen, old man," said Chiun. "Of jade, there is plenty in the outside world. We can get more. And of gold, much more. There are always craftsmen to make statues. Woods and amber and diamonds abound in greater weights than could ever fill this house. They can all be replaced, or recovered, as I intend to do, beginning now. But that was not what was stolen," repeated Chiun, pausing as he felt the anger burning in the perfection that was his heart.

  "What they stole was our dignity and strength. By daring to steal from this house, they have violated the House of Sinanju, violated its strength and reputation. This they have stolen, and for that they will pay. Mightily will they pay. Before the world they will pay."

  And then Chiun confided to the old man that the one whom he had been training as the next Master of Sinanju had not come with him to avenge this dishonor.

  "I saw him when he came before. He seemed most noble . . . for a white."

  "He appears to the untrained eye to be white," said Chiun. "But only now has he acted white. Do not repeat this, ever."

  "I will not," said the old man who respected Chiun so much.

  "The one who was to take my place does not even respect the treasure of Sinanju. He has gone off to help whites save the world."

  "No," said the old man, trying to imagine such ingratitude. He clutched his heart. This encouraged Chiun to confide further in a mere villager.

  "He thinks the sky is falling," whispered Chiun, and then it was too sad to discuss any longer, even with one so worthy as the old man who had been true to those who fed him.

  "Is he crazed?"

  "I thought he had overcome his backward white habits after all these years. You can train and train. But some whiteness always remains," Chiun said sadly.

  "Still white?" asked the old man, shocked.

  "A little. Not very much. It will go eventually. He was raised among them. But for now I must labor alone."

  In Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, the Master of Sinanju's every step was noted. How he had debarked from the plane, how he had entered the village, and what he had done there.