Return Engagement td-71

by Warren Murphy

  The Master of Sinanju was informed at the People's Democratic Airport that, no, he could not book a seat on a flight to the West. The North Korean airline did not fly to the West. If he wanted to go to Russia, and he had the proper documentation, fine. If he wished to fly to China, that, too, was possible. From Russia or China, he could obtain connections to any other proper destination in the Communist world.

  "Seoul," said the Master of Sinanju, still refusing to identify himself. "I can change for a Western flight in Seoul."

  The airport guards arrested the Master of Sinanju as soon as the words were out of his mouth. They called him a defector and a lackey of the West.

  Chiun's arrest lasted about as long as the epithets hung in the air around him.

  The two security guards found their rifles had jumped from their hands and embedded themselves, muzzlefirst, in the ceiling. Plaster fell on their bare heads. While they were looking up, they required major surgery. Very suddenly.

  The head surgeon at the People's Democratic Emergency Ward wanted to know how the two guards had managed to enter military service despite their obvious congenital defect.

  They were not believed when they explained that they were not really Siamese twins, born fused at the hip, but the victims of a particularly vicious Western attack. After surgery, they were court-martialed for concealing medical disabilities.

  By that time, Chiun had been deposited at Kimpo Air Base in South Korea in a North Korean military craft which had its markings removed. The pilot and copilot, who had volunteered for the mission, swallowed poison upon landing in Seoul, capital of South Korea.

  Chiun, oblivious of the fact that he had precipitated a major international incident, stepped off the aircraft and disappeared into the drizzle and fog of midmorning. He was one step ahead of the South Korean and American troops who converged upon the plane.

  Hours later, a Strategic Air Command bomber took off from Kimpo on a routine flight back to the United States. Over Hawaii, the pilot and copilot were more than a little astonished when they heard a knocking on the cabin door.

  They looked at one another. As far as they knew, the rear of the craft was empty. There shouldn't be anyone in hack.

  "Maybe a maintenance worker fell asleep," the pilot suggested.

  "I'll take a look," said the copilot, removing his earphones.

  When he opened the sealed door, he saw a little Korean in a gray robe.

  The little Korean smiled pleasantly.

  "You speakee English?" asked the copilot.

  "Better than you," retorted Chiun. "I have been waiting patiently for many hours. When are meals served on this flight?"

  Chapter 9

  In 1949 they had told him there was no hope.

  He did not believe them, not even in those early months in the green room. He was in an iron lung then. He was in an iron lung a long time, staring up at the angled mirror in which his seared face stared back as pale and bald as that of a new hatchling.

  The doctors had told him there was no hope of his ever leaving that mechanical barrel which kept him breathing in spite of his weakened lungs.

  But the face of the brutal Harold Smith stared back at him from the inescapable mirror. His hair grew back, in patches. His eyebrows resprouted. The plastic surgeons-paid for by benefactors from the old days-recarved his melted ears until they were like any normal person's ears, if smaller.

  And in time, they pulled him from the iron lung. He had demanded it. At first they refused, insisting that he would die. But he ordered them. In the name of the old days of the Reich that was now never to be, he ordered it. Finally they relented.

  And he breathed on his own.

  They had not told him he had lost both legs.

  "We thought it unnecessary to burden you," the doctor told him. "It is a miracle you are out of that damnable machine at all." His accent was of the old country, of the undivided Germany. He was the only one of the doctors he trusted. The others were good, but they were mongrels, with greasy black hair and skin the color of heavily creamed coffee. They spoke the debased Spanish tongue of Argentina.

  "I should have been told." he had railed at them. "Had I known, I would not have allowed myself to survive. Had I known, I would have gone to my grave in peace. What good is my freedom if I cannot walk? I have one good arm. With one arm I could strangle that assassin, Smith. One arm is all I would need. But no legs."

  The German doctor had shrugged helplessly.

  "You are fortunate to live at all. Be grateful for that." It had taken many years of therapy before he had the strength to sit up in a wheelchair. That was the second step. The third was the year the motorized wheelchair was put on the market. With that, there was no need to be pushed around by nurses. But that wasn't what he wanted.

  He wanted to walk. Erect, like a whole man.

  The years passed in the hospital outside of Buenos Aires. They gave him a wooden arm with a hook at the end of it. The hook had lasted barely a week. He would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming, trying to beat back the flames. The hook shattered the night-light, tore the bedclothes, and ripped open the cheek of one of the yelling nurses as she tried to hold him to the bed.

  They replaced the hook with a black plastic cap. It was as blunt and impotent as the smooth scar tissue of his groin, where the surgeons had, in those early days, removed the dead, gangrenous organ, and inserted a tiny plastic flange to keep the inflamed opening of the urinary tract from sealing over.

  It was an indignity that seemed inconsequential compared with the others Harold Smith had visited upon him in one red-lit evening. It did not matter that he was no different from a woman in that respect. He was still a man in his heart. And his heart lusted for a man's vengeance. An Aryan's vengeance.

  They told him there was no hope of walking. Ever. When they introduced the first bionic arms in the 1970's, he demanded one. And got it. He was no longer in the green room he had come to loathe, but in a stucco home near Saita that was paid for by donations from those of Germany who still believed and remembered. "If they can do this with arms, they can do it with legs," he had told his doctor at the time.

  "They are working on it," the doctor had told him. "I think they will succeed. It will be a boon for those missing one leg, yes. But for those with none . . ." The doctor had just shaken his head sadly.

  "There is no hope?" he had asked.

  "There is no hope."

  And he had believed him. But the face of the hated Harold Smith kept staring back from every mirror, every pane of glass touched by the Argentinian sun, and taunted him. Eternally young, he had taunted him.

  By that time he had established contacts throughout the world. There were people, good Germans, who had left the dismembered ruin of their native country and resettled in America. Some had visited him in his stucco home, to reminisce, to speak of the old days and old glories, glories that might still shine.

  "Find Smith," he had begged them. "Do not approach him. Do not touch him. Just find him."

  They had not found Smith. The old Office of Strategic Services had been disbanded. Smith had been an employee to the end, but there the trail ended. There was speculation that the man might have transferred over to the new intelligence organ of the United States government, the Central Intelligence Agency, but the old CIA records were impossible to access. There was no Harold Smith listed in the newer records.

  "Perhaps he is dead," they suggested.

  "No," he had spat back. "He lives for me. He lives for the day my hands clutch his throat. He is not dead. I would feel it if that were true. No, he is not dead. And I will find him. Somehow."

  It was then that he finally came to America, back to America. It was a changed place, but all the world had changed. Even he had changed.

  In America he had found many Harold Smiths. And so he had set out to kill them all.

  He had killed several. It had been easy, but oddly disappointing. None was the right one. And there were
so many Harold Smiths. He had begun to despair once more.

  Until today.

  Now the doctor was speaking words that brought him back to the present.

  "There is hope."

  "Are you certain?"

  "If what you tell me is true, there is hope," the doctor said. He was the latest doctor. Young, brilliant, loyal and one of the finest bionics experts in the country. The doctor had created his three-fingered claw that was superior to anything available from the best American medical-supply houses.

  "I have heard about this man D'Orr's discovery. If he's solved the titanium problem, then I can see the day when this method could be applied to bionic legs."

  "When?"

  "Three years. Perhaps less."

  "I cannot wait three years," he said.

  He was lying on an examing table, a sheet covering his stumps and the obscene nudity between them. Ilsa stood off to one side. He was not ashamed to let her see him like this, lying like a piece of wrinkled meat on the table. She had seen him like this many times. She dressed him, fed him, and bathed him. She helped him when he had to use the bathroom. He had no secrets from Ilsa-except perhaps his desire for her.

  He smiled at her, and she gently soothed his brow with a cool damp cloth.

  "We're so close to finding him," Ilsa told the doctor.

  "I cannot stop now," he told the doctor. "I have begun my search. What can you do for me?"

  "Nothing. "

  "What do you need? I will obtain it."

  "The technology exists," the doctor said. "The trouble is, it exists in two parts. I can give you anything that modern bionic engineering can provide. But you know the problem. Steel is too heavy for the powering mechanisms that would have to be built into each limb. Aluminum is too light. The legs would buckle under the strains you propose. I could give you legs tomorrow, but they would not be equal to the task. If I had D'Orr's nebulizer, it would be possible to create titanium parts that would work. Otherwise, we must wait for the device to come on the commercial market."

  "Then we will get D'Orr's secret," he said, and Ilsa squeezed his real hand tightly.

  "I will leave that up to you," said the doctor, replacing his stethoscope in his black bag. "Contact me when you have succeeded. I want to leave here while it is still dark. A man of my reputation cannot be seen coming and going from this place."

  "You are a good German," he told the doctor.

  There was hope. After all these years, there was hope.

  Chapter 10

  In his office at Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith rubbed his eyes furiously. Replacing his steel-rimmed glasses, he returned to the mocking video screen.

  A light snow was falling on Long island Sound. Smith had no eyes for its quiet beauty.

  Moment by moment, unusual reports flashed onto the silent screen. Tapped off wire-service and network newsfeeds, only CURE-potential events showed on the screen. Smith had long ago worked out a system that enabled the dumb, unthinking computer to separate human-interest and other miscellaneous events-the chaff of the daily news-from the wheat, possible CURE priority material. Buzzwords were the key to the program, buzzwords like "death," "murder," "crime." When the computer found those words, it filed those reports.

  Smith read each time the screen flashed a new paragraph.

  In Boston, a twenty-two-year-old girl was shot twice in the chest in a drug-related murder. The previous week she had escaped a similar attack by unknown persons brandishing an Uzi machine gun.

  In Miami, two undercover vice cops were missing for the third day and presumed dead.

  In San Francisco, military police surrounded an Air Force transport upon its arrival from the Far East. The pilots claimed they had a mysterious Oriental stowaway, but when the plane was boarded, no trace of the stowaway was found.

  And for the fourth day in a row, no one named Harold Smith had been found murdered anywhere in the United States.

  Smith brought up the U.S. map on which the trail of the Harold Smith killings was plotted. The line stopped in Oakham, Massachusetts. Cold. No other Harold Smiths had died in that state, as Smith had projected. Or in Rhode Island. Or in Connecticut.

  What did it mean?

  Had the killings stopped as mindlessly as they had begun? Or was the unknown killer simply still traveling to his next victim? In four days, he could have entirely covered Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union. Or Connecticut, for that matter.

  Unless, of course, the killer intended to bypass those states. Unless he was already in New York State. Unless he was in the vicinity of Rye, New York.

  Smith had ordered the security guards attached to Foleroft on high alert, but they were not equipped to handle anything this serious. Folcroft was an ordinary institution, and the guards believed they were guarding an expensive health facility. Smith, with the resources of the United States government at his command, could have ordered Folcroft surrounded by crack units of the National Guard. Navy helicopters could, in less than an hour, be deployed in the air over the grounds.

  And by the seven-o'clock news, CURE's cover would be exposed to the harsh spotlight of the media, if not blown entirely. There was no way to hide Smith's intelligence background. A cover-up of his past had been considered during the formative days of CURE, and rejected.

  Instead, Smith had simply retired from his CIA position and taken a dull but well-paid job in the private sector. It was done all the time. No one would have suspected Smith's new position as director of Folcroft masked America's greatest secret.

  So no helicopters flew the skies to protect Harold W. Smith.

  For the same reasons. Smith dared not bring the still-undiscovered pattern of killings to the attention of law-enforcement agencies. In fact, he had spent a good part of the last four days pulling strings to make certain that local police reports on the killings did not enter the interagency police intelligence networks. Computer files were mysteriously erased. Paper files disappeared from locked cabinets.

  No, there must be no headlines detailing the killing of Harold Smiths. It would draw attention to every Harold Smith in Smith's age group-the age group of the thirteen murder victims to date.

  And so, Harold W. Smith, with the might of the entire United States military at his command, but unable to call the police like any other citizen, worked in his Spartan office, his only protection a Colt .45 automatic in his upper-right-hand desk drawer. His eyes remained fixed on the busy computer terminal. It would tell him when the mysterious killer struck again.

  Unless, of course, he struck at Folcroft. In that case, Smith would know in a more immediate way. Because Smith would be the next victim.

  The phone rang and Smith scooped it up.

  "Harold?"

  It was Smith's wife. "Yes, dear?"

  "It's six o'clock. Aren't you coming home tonight?"

  "I'm afraid I'm going to be working late again. I'm sorry."

  "I'm worried about you. Harold, about us."

  "There's nothing to worry about," Smith said in an unconvincing monotone.

  "We're slipping, aren't we? Back into our old ways."

  "You mean I'm slipping, don't you?" said Smith, his voice warming.

  "I wish you were here."

  "I wish I was home too." Out of the corner of his eye Smith saw an entry flash on his video screen. "I have to go now. I'll be in touch."

  "Harold-"

  Smith hung up abruptly. Turning to the screen, he saw the name Smith. He relaxed when he saw that the item was a news report about a politician, last name Smith, who had been arrested on a bribery charge.

  False alarm. Smith thought about calling his wife back, but what did it matter now? She was right. He was slipping back into his old habits, his cold manner.

  They had a good marriage, but only because she put up with his long hours, his constant preoccupation, his dry manner. Srnith was a good provider, a stable husband, and a churchgoer, but that was as far as it went. A lifetime of public service ha
d crystallized him into the ultimate bureaucrat. A lifetime of responsibility for America's defense had boiled the juices from him.

  When Remo and Chiun were set free from CURE, Smith had found freedom himself. Freedom had made a new man of him. He had grown closer to his wife. After forty years of complacent marriage, they were like newlyweds again.

  And it had lasted barely three months, Smith thought bitterly, forcing his thoughts to refocus on the here and now.

  Smith did not know who the killer was. He did not know for certain that his rampage through the ranks of Harold Smiths was a hit-or-miss attempt to snuff out Smith's own life. But he had to assume so.

  First there was Smith's background. His OSS/CIA history was full of old enemies. There had been CURE-related enemies, but thanks to Remo and Chiun, none of them had lived. No, this matter could not involve CURE. Anyone knowing of Smith's link to CURE had to know enough to locate him with ease.

  That made the killer, inevitably, someone from Smith's pre-CURE days, But who? Whoever it was did not know certain important facts.

  He did not know where Smith currently lived or worked.

  He did not know Smith's full name, otherwise only Harold W. Smiths would be targetted.

  But most important, he did not know he was stalking a man who could fight back.

  Chapter 11

  Boyce Barlow had single-handedly made the town of Dogwood, Alabama-population 334-racially pure. Boyce was very proud of his accomplishment. Dogwood, Alabama, was his hometown, not far from the big city of Huntsville. There were no Jews in Dogwood. Never had been. There were no Asians in Dogwood, although there were a few in Rocket City. As long as they stayed in Rocket City, Boyce Barlow didn't much care about them.

  Boyce Barlow was the founder of the White Purity League of Alabama. He had founded it one night in Buckhorn's Lounge, about two weeks after his unemployment checks ran out, while a string band played bad country music on the jukebox.

  "This country is going to hell," Boyce told his cousins Luke and Bud.

  Luke and Bud each lifted a bottle of Coors in salute to Boyce's righteous sentiment. Luke burped.